matthew griffin's reading journal

G.M. Malliet's Death and the Lit Chick & Death at the Alma Mater

2011-12-21T19:30:00.000-05:00

G.M. Malliet,
Death and the Lit Chick, 2009
Death at the Alma Mater, 2010

I haven't blogged promptly about these two: in fact, I renewed them so they could stare at me and make me blog about them, but they're now overdue. Not a habit to get into! They both continue on from Death of a Cozy Writer, with the further investigations of Detective Chief Inspector St. Just, a worthy and capable protagonist for the genre.

In Death and the Lit Chick, St. Just finds himself at a castle in Scotland, offering a workshop at a crime-writers' conference about evidentiary procedure and the like. He finds himself with a crush on one of the writers, only to have her (and the rest of the weird lot) become suspects when one of the authors is murdered while the castle's drawbridge is up — the locked-room mystery writ Gothic. Malliet does a terrific job at describing St. Just's fascination with Portia De'Ath: it's a very well written capturing of a first blush of feelings. The mystery itself is decent, but not overly remarkable: odd relationships and details typical of castles and of CSI help an okay plot along to a forgettable conclusion, complete with all the suspects gathered in the Great Room for the great detective's explication of the crime. (The addition of DCI Ian Moor, the detective in charge of the investigation, is a nice touch to St. Just — we actually get someone who is St. Just's equal, and pleasantly funny to boot.

Death at the Alma Mater is more tightly plotted but less plausible. Summoned to a Cambridge college, St. Just finds himself investigating an odd gaggle of alumni from whom the college is trying to raise a pretty penny. The murder of one of their number prompts an investigation that leads St. Just off at weird angles before finally seeing through an overly-complicated scheme and nabbing the murderer.

I'm going to keep reading Malliet's mysteries, as her writing is certainly entertaining. It has a piece I need missing, though. I enjoy the way she plays with the unities of place and time (a manor house, a castle, a college, a village; a weekend, a conference, a weekend, a fair), but there's a failure in the effort to break through the conventions that I have trouble getting past. In the St. Just series, we watch as she gathers her overly weird suspects to traditional venues for a murder. She bumps off one or more of the cast, and we move through the investigation. Each time, I've waited for the turn, the new take on the convention--and on the times it has come, it has been too slight an innovation or too weak a new look. There's such potential that never quite offers something new. I also struggle with the characters: while some, like St. Just, De'Ath, and Sgt. Fear, are well developed, too many of the others are given a quick sketch and that's all we're given to understand them: Malliet doesn't write Russian novels, but I still needed her character list because I simply wasn't motivated by the writing to tell a couple of characters apart in each of the stories. The newer Wicked Autumn shows improvement on that score, but with too trite and poorly developed a conclusion to be called a great murder-mystery.

I will gladly read her next book, as I do enjoy her work. I wish I could enjoy it just a bit more.

Tony Hendra's _Father Joe_

2011-12-21T14:04:00.003-05:00

Tony Hendra, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul, 2004.

Three-quarters memoir, two-tenths paean, one twentieth context, Hendra's book needs to be approached as a reflection on how his own life has been changed by another. It's not a biography, nor an introduction to what life is like in a Benedictine monastery: it's about Hendra's life, and how it's better because of Father Joe's role in it.

The eponymous Father Joe was a Benedictine monk at Quarr Abbey. After an indiscretion as a lad with a married woman, her husband took Hendra to the Abbey. The book is really about how Fr. Joe helped Hendra to grow up: recovering from the relationship, and then in nearly every aspect of his life. Hendra discovers a deep admiration both for Fr. Joe himself and for the Benedictine way of life (though with, I'd argue, an overly fixed view of the latter: later in the book Hendra describes his inability to cope at all well with the liturgy changing from Latin to English). He decides he wants to become a monk, and lives with Quarr as a second home and Fr. Joe as a second father. Thwarted in his desires to enter Quarr by winning a scholarship to Cambridge, Hendra's life turns to the career as a satirist — and all of the accompanying messes that emerge as a life is lived.

The book is an engaging read, and it's easy to identify with many of the stages Hendra identifies in his own life: his awakening to vocation, and his subsequent loss of faith; his discovery of comedy as art, and his flailing attempts to live with another. I found it both moving and endearing to read his portrayal of his father and his own marital challenges.

The two most effective parts of the book were for me the twin morals: be where you are, and love. The first is explored best around Hendra's second marriage: Fr. Joe's advice to Hendra is to do a better job of being a husband (and father), to find his sense of roots in the marriage. It's a translation of the Benedictine vow of stability, the sense that life isn't better anywhere else, but is best lived where one is. The second portion is best expressed when Fr. Joe and Hendra talk about what humour is, and we see the ease with which humour — and satire in particular — can hurt: Fr. Joe's impulse to ask deeper questions about the intent and design of the humour is subtle for the reader, but wise indeed.

One weakness of the book is the dialogue, and I wish I had a better sense of what bothers me about it. Hendra presents conversations he had with Fr. Joe, and there are times when the dialogue is plausible, and times when it's quite difficult to read. I think this is just a stylistic issue, a failure of the author to capture the authentic rhythms of speech because the idea is more important than the style, but I'm not quite sure. I plan to spend some more time thinking about that question.

Ultimately, it's an enjoyable read and rewarding for more than just those interested in living a religious life: Hendra succeeds in capturing something of the struggles of life, and his view of his path manages to offer insights for the reader without ever slipping and becoming prescriptive.

"Richard Castle", Heat Rises

2011-12-07T23:28:00.001-05:00

“Richard Castle”, Heat Rises, 2011.

Yes, this book was an odd reading choice after my disappointment in the second volume of “Castle’s” series. [For those not in the loop, Richard Castle is a character on the TV show Castle, played by the delightfully insouciant Nathan Fillion; Castle is a crime-fiction writer, and this series of books is loosely based on his character’s experiences as the partner of Detective Kate Becket.]

The novel is in the same vein as the first two: quippy, funny, and similar to the show in many ways. I didn’t have the same suspension of disbelief issues as I had with the last outing, but I did find this newest volume overly predictable (You’re going to figure this one out, if you’ve read a mystery of two before). The twist with Heat Rises is that it’s an interesting fictionalisation/projected-wish-fulfilment commentary on the events of the previous season of Castle. It doesn’t add anything viewers would miss, but is interesting to read the book in light of the episodes. What I find fascinating is that the intertextuality is now in this direction rather than the other: we’ve moved from watching Castle and catching Kate reading a copy in the washroom to readers noticing links to the tv show. Fundamentally, this shift seems to be about advertising and attracting the same audience (or a subset) across different platforms. I hope not to see this worrisome trend continue, but won’t count my chickens.

Bill Bryson's At Home

2011-11-18T13:30:00.000-05:00

Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, 2010.

I bought A Short History of Nearly Everything in the airport bookstore in Glasgow just before my flight home a few years ago, and greatly enjoyed Bryson's clear and engaging exploration of what makes our world tick. I enjoy learning from him, and when I already know some of the things he's discussing, I delight in his deftly humorous touch.

I was quite pleased to discover his new book, At Home, which uses his house to explore how we have come to live in the comfort we generally think of when we hear the word home. Bryson moves from room to room, explaining both how they came to exist in their modern forms, and historical and sociological developments associated with them. The chapter on the bedroom contains information both on mites and other wee beasties that share our rooms, fashion and the history of bedding, and both sex and childbirth (and quite the discursive exploration of the development of modern surgical technique) before discussing death and burial and mourning customs. That on the bathroom discusses not just plumbing, but the entirety of the development of the sewage system. The stairs chapter alone has convinced me to hold on to the handrail with every future ascent and descent of my life, after hearing rather sobering statistics on falls!

Though long, the book is eminently readable and fascinating. I discovered both interesting trivia and the histories of discoveries and engineering feats that left me going to bed too late for a couple of nights. Bryson has a fascination with the more interesting of the personalities one can encounter in history, and we re treated to the eccentricities and marvels of both Washington and Jefferson, of Joseph Paxton and Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, and many more. What's remarkable is how the asides all come back to his topic, and how Bryson is able to use his own home as a lens to explore modern life in all of its variety. Curiosity is rewarded; wondering is a worthy thing to do, and we can come to realize that the shape of our lives has been determined by our connection to the work of many varied people and groups (having read this book, you'll not take either bricks or glass for granted again, without marveling at their complexity).

Throughout the book, Bryson is engaged in a subtle project that only culminates at its very end; a project that was made clear in A Short History of Nearly Everything though the and sweep of science here is revealed through the small details of quotidian living. He writes:

Today it takes the average citizen of Tanzania almost a year to produce the same volume of carbon emissions as is effortlessly generated every two and a half days by a European, or every twenty-eight hours by an American. We are, in short, able to live as we do because we use resources at hundreds of times the rate of most of the planet's other citizens. One day--and don't expect it to be a distant day--many of those six billion or so less well-off people are bound to demand what we have, and to get it as effortlessly as we got it, and that will require more resources than this plant can easily, or even conceivably, yield.The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither. But that of course would be another book. (451-52)

Bryson's sobering thoughts are well worth heeding, and make me turn again to Mike Nickerson's thesis in Life, Money, and Illusion: Living on Earth as If We Want to Stay that all uses of resources need to account not just for monetary costs but for their true impact upon the planet. I hope we'll heed both messages; after enjoying such a lovely book as Bryson's, it's a good thing to be brought up short.

G.M. Malliet's Death of a Cozy Writer

2011-11-17T21:18:00.001-05:00

G.M. Malliet, Death of a Cozy Writer, 2008.

Having finished the most recent of Malliet's murder mysteries after a friend's recommendation, I started reading her earlier work. I have the other two in this series out from the library, and am looking forward to reading them.

I quite enjoyed the novel--more so, in fact, than Wicked Autumn. Set almost entirely in the family manse of Sir Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk (the much loved crime writer), the story revolves around his nastiness and the wackiness of his family members. As he is overly fond of rewriting his will, it's hard to tell just who benefits from his death — and just why has someone killed off his eldest son, first? Old personal histories and eccentric characters are mixed with together, and only DCI St. Just can unravel the myriad questions that are left unanswered. As in Wicked Autumn, the story unfolds gradually, with different pieces being added to the puzzle as St. Just interviews and explores, and here, too, the solution is both far from obvious and yet entirely sensible given the pieces we readers have acquired as we follow St. Just.

I'm looking forward to reading the next two books in the series.

G.M. Malliet's Wicked Autumn

2011-11-03T10:30:00.001-04:00

G.M. Malliet, Wicked Autumn, 2011.

An entertaining murder-mystery set in a small English town, Wicked Autumn has much to recommend it. The story revolves around Max, a former MI-5 agent turned Church of England vicar, who comes across the dead body of one of his parishioner’s not in hospital but in the village hall—and in circumstances that don’t quite make sense. After striking up a quick friendship with DCI Cotton, Max begins to investigate himself.

Malliet’s structure meanders through the small town and its characters, bouncing from one to the next as Max makes visits and discoveries. I found myself, professionally, being a bit concerned about his focus on investigation rather than on pastoral care, but the novel is a murder mystery, after all! We learn the quirks of the town’s denizens, and generally find ourselves amazed at just how self-centred the victim truly was.

The solution to the mystery comes as a bit of a surprise, despite the clues that make sense retrospectively—always nice to end a British mystery with the detective laying out the whole story for the reader, I suppose.

The novel was strong enough for me to place a hold at the library on the first book in her earlier mystery series, and I look forward to relaxing with it soon.

Graham Speake's Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise

2011-10-08T15:12:00.001-04:00

Graham Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, 2003.

Graham Speake’s book is a lovely introduction to the monasteries and sketes of Athos, from their origins to today (or rather, to 2002, but what’s 9 years when we’re talking about over a millennium of history?). Part history and part spiritual exploration, Speake’s focus never wavers from trying to offer the reader a sense of why Athos’ existence matters to God, the Orthodox, and the world.

For the unaware, Athos seems like a throwback to a former time and way of being. A peninsula of Greece (that was once an island, thanks to the ambitious canal digging of the emperor Xerxes I in his erstwhile conquests), it is home to twenty Eastern Orthodox monasteries and a plethora of smaller communities (sketes) and hermits who live lives paradoxically dedicated to the renunciation of the world and to praying for it. It is consecrated to Mary, and for over a millennium, no woman has been allowed on the isthmus (punishable even today, by Greek law, by a period of 2-12 months) so as to leave it as her exclusive preserve. The story goes that she was travelling to visit Lazarus, and was forced to take shelter on Athos: so moved by its beauty, she asked her son for it for herself. This legend offers a significant example of a challenge Speake deals with in the book: the monks understanding of Athos revolves not even primarily around what can be historically proven, but around the stories and legends of their collective experience on the Mountain. Speake holds this balance well for the reader.

The oldest monastery on Athos, the Megistis Lavra (Great Lavra) was founded in 963, and the others have followed over time. While most are of Greek origin, some were founded by monks from all over the Orthodox world (such as Iviron's Georgian origins, Chillandariou’s Serbian roots, and St. Panteleimonos’ and Russia). They have survived Ottoman rule, the Axis powers, the birth of modern Greece, and even its entry into the European Union. An often turbulent history makes for intriguing reading, both about foreign relations and Athos’ own internal arguments and challenges.

Speake’s long association with the Friends of Mount Athos, as well as multiple pilgrimages to Athos have resulted in close associations with quite a number of monks on Athos, and his writing shows a deep understanding not just of Athos’ history and geography, but of its ideals. His own understandable biases against nationalism within Athos’ administration and toward hospitality even of non-Orthodox pilgrims become clear as one reads: even without as full an appreciation of Orthodoxy as I might like to have, Speake’s writing is an accessible and inviting introduction. The marvellous collection of photographs that accompany the text are a stunning resource to help the reader comprehend Athos’ remoteness and beauty, and to grasp something of what monastic life is like there.

Some years ago, on retreat at St. Gregory’s, Three Rivers, I heard read at meals Christopher Merrill’s Things of the Hidden God. It was my first introduction to Athos, and Speake’s less-personal book has made me intrigued about the prospect of making a pilgrimage to the holy mountain someday—to experience worship at Vatopedi and some of the sketes seems like a very exciting notion.

2011-09-30T14:30:00.000-04:00

Josh Ritter, Bright’s Passage, 2011.

This blog is meant to be a journal: it’s a place for me to reflect on the book I read. At times that means entries are akin to reviews, with jottings to help me remember the book if I struggle to recall it; other times, I’m trying to work through ideas. With this novel, though, both tasks are made more complicated because of my fan-boy-ish adulation of Josh Ritter as a musican, song-writer, and story-teller. I’ve loved Ritter’s music since I first heard “Come and Find Me” as the end credits rolled on an episode of “Six Feet Under” many years ago: I rushed out and bought Golden Age of Radio the next morning.

There’s a rush of language in Ritter’s lyrics that delights and entrances. Sometimes the lyrics are almost cryptic (‘I keep you in a flower vase / with your fatalism and your crooked face / with the daisies and the violet brocades’); at other times, the narrative is funny and engaging (‘At this, Sir Galahad got angry, / “Angel,” he said, “don’t you tempt me. / I wish to go to heaven and not to hell. / So when stable boys look lonesome, / when the women call me handsome, I’ll hold me virtue very firmly by myself.”’). There’s an interesting tension between agnosticism and ire at God that’s frequently expressed as in “Thin Blue Flame” (‘If God’s up there he’s in a cold dark room / the heavenly host are just the cold dark moons / He bent down and made the world in seven days / and ever since he’s been a’walking away’) and the ever-stunning “Girl in the War” ('... the keys to the Kingdom got lost inside the Kingdom / and the angels fly around in there but we can’t see them / I got a girl in the war Paul I know that they can hear me yell / if they can’t find a way to help her they can go to Hell'). And yet, the cadence and rhythm of scripture express themselves in deeply positive ways, too, as in the brilliant (and Paul Simon-influenced) “Lark”: ‘I am assured, yes I am assured yes / I am assured peace will come to me / A peace that can yes surpass the speed yes / Of my understanding and my need’.

Why go through those examples? Well, it’s impossible for me to read Bright’s Passage except through the lens of Ritter’s music that I have listened too so often and so carefully for a number of years now. Playful language, careful story-telling, and a deeply ambiguous sense of the numinous are as present in his first novel as they are in his songs.

Bright’s Passage follows Henry Bright. Just back to his home in West Virginia after serving in the First World War, Bright is coping with the death of his wife, Rachel, and his son’s birth as the story begins. That coping is complicated by an angel inhabiting the body of a horse who keeps giving Bright directions, and then made worse by the pursuit of both a nasty fire and the malicious father and sons of Bright’s dead bride. Interwoven with this story in the present is the story of Bright’s experiences fighting in France.

The writing is vivid and evocative in both time periods, and well-crafted. It’s spare, and uses details that make sense to Bright. The first sentence opens with the true freight of the book: “The baby boy wriggled in his arms, a warm, wet mass, softer than a goat and hairier than a rabbit kit.” (3) This novel is about life and death and possibility, simultaneously attached and disconnected to the world that never does run away. The opening of the second chapter—a switch from West Virginia to France—functions similarly:

Mud and water and the stumps of trees. In every direction that was all there was. Bodies fell, but the trees died standing up. Nightly they were crucified upon themselves by the zip and whine of machine guns, their leaves corroded by gas, their branches and trunks hacked for kindling, some roots cut by entrenching tools, others drowned by the ceaseless, steady dripping of blood and rain. (13)

There’s an obvious contrast between the crucified trees—and the entire passion that is the war—and the new birth of his son into an uncertain future that is the central tension of the novel: how can Bright enter a new future, leaving behind the cruelty and pain of the past? It’s a question intensified by the dubious quality of his memory, when we read of him seeing Rachel’s brothers cruelly kill fellow soldiers despite our certainty from our perspective as readers that they’d not have been in France. Bright is like a blind man, running unseeing from a terror that’s hunting him to a future that he’s unable to see. All is made worse by this peculiar angel with his own agenda—and angels are never easy or felicitous creatures in Ritter’s work! (I really do love the brilliance and humour of “Galahad” that offers another great example of why angels are to be feared, if they’re Ritter’s creations.)

It’s an impressive first novel, perhaps precisely because of Ritter’s care and practise of story-telling in so many other genres. It has some infelicities—it’s heavy-handed at times, and the ending is a little over-easy—but they’re easy to overlook whether you’re as fond of him as I or not. I’m looking forward to hearing what others make of it.

2011-09-28T10:53:00.001-04:00

Terry Fallis,
The Best Laid Plans,2007.
The High Road, 2010.

Fallis’s two comic novels follow Daniel Addison and erstwhile professor of English who can’t quite escape his life as a former political aide. At the beginning of The Best Laid Plans, we meet Addison: tired of the cynicism of professional politics (and escaping the ruins of a tarnished relationship), Addison leaves the Liberal party’s Leader’s office to work at the University of Ottawa. Determined to make a clean break, his final act for the party will be to find a candidate and run the campaign for the constituency of Cumberland-Prescott: a riding that’s never varied from its deep-blue Conservative tendencies. As Addison finds an apartment to rent in the yard of the hovercraft-building, chess-loving, English-grammar-excessively-pedantic Engineering professor named Angus McLintock, he also makes a deal: Addison will teach English to Engineers, and McLintock will run for the Liberals (with no lawn signs, campaigning, etc.) against the widely loved Conservative finance minister. Hilarity ensues, both within and without the corridors of power, and the second book continues the adventures of Addison and McLintock.

They’re both funny books. High-minded and idealistic about the capacity of politicians to work for the betterment of the nation, there are clunky moments and widely unbelievable plot points (the set piece with the hovercraft and the drunken First Lady of the United States!). I’m certain that Angus would find much more meaningful censure at the hand of the leader of his party than he experiences, in both books, despite his supposed popularity. There’s an overuse of fart jokes. And yet, for all of my quibbles, the quips and set pieces are funny. One can easily see why The Best Laid Plans won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour in 2008. The idealism is reminiscent of The West Wing, and the lasting and exciting myth of politicians who are themselves idealistic is captivating and hopeful.

2011-09-20T20:19:00.000-04:00

Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test, 2011.I came into a loan of this book quite fortuitously. I'd heard Ronson interviewed on The Sound of Young America and on This American Life within a week or so of one another, and was intrigued. A friend happened to have it on her desk when I was visiting, and since she won't have time to read it for a space, she loaned it to me. It's almost as though I was meant to read it.

Ronson is an entertaining and engaging writer, though a tad sporadic: there are times when his stories about his own neuroses are a meaningful help to his argument, and times when I found them off-putting. That statement may be an expression of taste: I didn't mark examples to share. The story begins when he's contacted by a neurologist about a mysterious manuscript that's been sent to a number of different scientists, all of whom are unable to decipher it. Ronson's skills as an investigative journalist help him to find the author, and lead him into musings about sanity and a variety of challenges in mental health. Those musings lead him to an interest in psychopathy, the focal point of the book. He tries to make sense of psychopathy's definition, how it is diagnosed, how it is treated, and how psychopaths live in the world. His exploration includes a look at the history of psychology, and more general issues as well. Much of the book revolves around Bob Hare and his work--the development of the test for psychopathy, and the workshops on how to use it. I was deeply amused as Ronson uses the test with a CEO best-known for firing many, many people, to assess the prevalence of psychopathy in the corporate world. These explorations aren't just funny set pieces, mere side-notes to the argument, but are a marvellous way of exploring Ronson's increasing discomfort with the assessment of psychopathy and the label in general.

It's as he engages Scientologists and their attacks on psychiatry that Ronson's book reveals something just as fascinating as his subject matter: his own struggle as a journalist to maintain objectivity while entering into relationships that will help him engage in his research. The encounters with Tony--an incarcerated diagnosed psychopath--and Brian, a scientologist campaigning against psychiatry, are compelling and very well-written. We see it again in Ronson's depiction of his relationship with Bob Hare: though never studied as self-reflectively as that with Tony, it's even more intriguing, and we're left wondering about a certain level of monomania.

All in all, it's an unsettling book. I enjoyed it, but was left even more concerned than when I began it about how mental health labels are used, particularly in relationship to criminal justice issues. The only resolution I came away with was to decide to add The Men Who Stare at Goats to my to-read list.

2011-08-27T15:54:00.002-04:00

Jonathan Lethem, Gun, with Occasional Music, 1994.

A marvellous science fiction detective noir, Gun, with Occasional Music presents a brilliantly realised but completely accessible dystopian world. Set in a future when it’s impolite and impermissible to ask questions, where babies and animals have been raised to sentience and functionality, where the news is all just music, and in which most citizens are heavy users of a drug called make (blended with various different amounts of Forgettol, Acceptol, Regrettol, and the like), our gumshoe protagonist stumbles into a murder mystery he’d rather not know much about. After all, Metcalf’s got problems of his own—not least of which is that, after swapping physical responses with a female friend for a weekend, she left without returning his … responses. Into his life walks Orton Angwine, a man who will soon go down for the murder of the last client of our “private inquisitor,” a man named Maynard Stanhunt. Events tumble into one another, and Metcalf soon finds himself running afoul of the Office of the inquisitors (and two in particular). Office politics, a confusing family intersection of victim and mob boss, babyheads, talking sheep and a certain nasty kangaroo working as mob muscle all combine to create a memorable read, a well-executed sci-fi noir that needs to be more widely read than it is. I wish I remember who recommended this novel to me, but I find myself reaching out excitedly to read more of Lethem’s work.

2011-08-26T19:45:00.002-04:00

Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence, 2011.

Fish’s book is a paean to good writing. He believes that all good writing starts with writing good sentences, and that we don’t do a good job of teaching our students how to write such sentences; we get bogged down in confusing grammatical points or offer vague descriptions instead of offering good ways into good writing. Fish proposes that “(1) a sentence is an organization of items in the world; and (2) a sentence is a structure of logical relationships” (16). The essential problem with his book is revealed in this definition: the book will be appreciated and enjoyed by those people who already like sentences, and have a handle on how they work, while those who do not will neither profit much from the book nor enjoy it.

Throughout, he offers studies of good sentences and describes why they work. Fish is engaging and readable, and even entertaining at time. Where the argument wobbles is in the presentation of exercises to help the prospective writer (his audience) learn to write sentences as good as the superlative examples being studied: Fish’s own sample responses to his prompts aren’t in the same league as the originals, and feel both woefully imitative and wan in comparison. He points this fact out himself, too frequently, and both weaknesses distract from the argument. Yet his examples! And his close-readings that so wonderfully explicate why his examples are as good as they are! Fish produces an unexpected study of excerpts of some of the best writing I have ever encountered, and this book is worth reading for these choices alone.

When he moves in the final four chapters from form to content, Fish offers a few brilliant and constructive ways to think about writing. Perhaps most significant of these is his way of describing how first sentences should work. Instead of thinking about “topic sentences,” writers should remember that “First sentences know all about the sentences that will follow them” and thus “First sentences have what I call an ‘angle of lean’; the lean forward, inclining in the direction of the elaborations they anticipate" (99). This idea is still one for people who already grasp the concept, but it is as elegant a way of thinking about how to begin a piece of writing than any I have encountered.

It is a book to read if one loves both reading and writing, and I’d advise the prospective reader to anticipate both felicities and disappointments in their time with How to Write a Sentence.

2011-08-25T19:34:00.002-04:00

Patricia Briggs, River Marked, 2011.

We continue with the saga of Mercedes Thompson. Mercy's a VW mechanic on the days she's allowed to just go to work, but most of her clients don't know that she shifts into the form of a coyote and goes running and getting into trouble with fae, vampires, and the like in a fair bit of the time she's not at her garage. This new novel finds her recovering from her misadventures in the last, and before long, moving up her marriage to the Alpha-werewolf of their environs and going away camping for a honeymoon. Briggs weaves native American traditions and legends fairly deftly into her story, and Mercy finds herself dealing with malicious forces, river otters, and the very sources of myth all while new-husband Adam is mostly incapacitated. It's a fun romp, and eminently entertaining.

2011-08-08T22:55:00.001-04:00

Neil Gaiman, American Gods, 2001.

I’m not sure why it has taken me so long to sit down with a book by Neil Gaiman. I’ve travelled in circles with those who admire him tremendously, and yet have never picked up Sandman or anything else until this novel, just as it reaches its tenth anniversary. It’s certainly my loss that I’ve waited so long.

Gaiman’s achievement in this novel is remarkable: he writes an entertaining and gripping story; he brings a pantheon of half-remembered deities and folktales into the context of America both in who the members were and how they have existed on this continent; and he constructs a gripping battle between the minor deities of yore and those constructs too-worshipped today. What I admire most about the writing is the balance the author strikes between vivid, realised depictions and letting the reader create and imagine as s/he reads. What’s also quite striking is Gaiman’s deftness with myth, his grasp of how stories live and breathe and the power they have.

The plot follows Shadow, just released from prison and quickly in the employ of a dark and mercurial character who seems to be working to bring about a confrontation between the Gods that were and those now more readily worshipped. Shadow’s is a dark quest: he seeks meaning and life in a world where he feels as trapped as he had inside. We learn early in the novel that he has ecountered two key learnings in prison: only do your own time, not anyone else’s; and “Call no man happy until he is dead.” (So nice to meet people, fictional or no, with a fondness for Herodotus!) As one might expect, these become the twin pillars that Shadow seeks to learn how to live. His adventure, which roams from coast to coast to the very centre of America (in Kansas, if we ignore Alaska and Hawaii), is an exploration of myth and of America itself: centred less in those major centres that we hear about so often, the novel is also a paean to Gaiman’s adopted country, reveling in the glory (and strange peculiarities!) of life in small towns unknown to all not from them and the weirdness of the various roadside attractions that can be stumbled upon.

It’s a marvellous novel, and well worth reading. Time to add some more Gaiman to my list.

2011-07-25T21:48:00.003-04:00

I came across the Sunday Times list of “The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945” at Of Books and Bicycles.

Philip Larkin – I don’t know as well as I should, but quite like what I’ve read.

George Orwell - the two everyone has read, and some of the essays. On tea and grammar, well worth reading.

William Golding – had trouble staying awake

Ted Hughes – Paul Muldoon has rekindled my interest

Doris Lessing – I’m ashamed to say not

J. R. R. Tolkien - The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but otherwise just “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”

V. S. Naipaul – ah, Mr. Biswas

Muriel Spark – not yet

Kingsley Amis - only Lucky Jim, which I didn’t find as funny as I’d hoped

Angela Carter - no

C. S. Lewis - too much. Narnia, Lost Planet, and a heap of his apologetics. While once I had time for him, that phase has passed.

Iris Murdoch – never been excited

Salman Rushdie - Midnight’s Children and the Satanic Verses

Ian Fleming – Mom wouldn’t let me when she still okayed my reading as a lad, so I devoured the lot and found them boring as a teenager

Jan Morris – unknown to me

Roald Dahl – Quite a lot, though not for some time. I was quite fond of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More

Anthony Burgess - no

Mervyn Peake – mmm… Gormenghast-y goodness

Martin Amis – never been excited

Anthony Powell - nope

Alan Sillitoe – I read The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner because of Belle & Sebastian. Haven’t bothered with anything else.

John Le Carré – decent, clever spy-thriller stuff but never got super excited

Penelope Fitzgerald - no

Philippa Pearce - no

Barbara Pym - no

Beryl Bainbridge - no

J. G. Ballard – no— classmates in grad school whose taste I trusted loathed Crash, so I've never bothered

Alan Garner - no

Alasdair Gray – don’t even know the name

John Fowles - The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Collector, The Magus

Derek Walcott – some of the poetry, but not much.

Kazuo Ishiguro – I will always buy and make time for a new Ishiguro. I adore An Artist of the Floating World

Anita Brookner – I don’t know her stuff

A. S. Byatt – I quite like some-- Possession , especially--and was bored by others

Ian McEwan – as variable as Byatt, but not quite reaching her heights

Geoffrey Hill – He may be one of my favourite poets. I have been a different person since reading “Lacrimae Amantis”

Hanif Kureishi – has been in the to-read pile for too long

Iain Banks - no

George Mackay Brown – haven’t even heard the name before

A. J. P. Taylor - haven’t even heard the name before

Isaiah Berlin – to-read

J. K. Rowling – “One of these things is not like the other”. Yes, all 7, but man did she need an editor after the first

Philip Pullman – I quite enjoy Pullman. His Dark Materials is brilliant, and The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is fun and thought-provoking

Julian Barnes – mmm…. I enjoy Barnes. I do want to know to whom I loaned A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters and if s/he will return it.

Colin Thubron - haven’t even heard the name before

Bruce Chatwin – I’ve had Patagonia recommended to me more than once, but others have panned it. Inertia is a significant force in my life

Alice Oswald - haven’t even heard the name before

Benjamin Zephaniah - haven’t even heard the name before

Rosemary Sutcliff – I read a lot as a child. Warrior Scarlet and Knight’s Fee were particular favourites

Michael Moorcock - haven’t even heard the name before

I should look up the people I haven’t heard of.
And the Times needs to have the heads of its staff checked for omitting David Mitchell.
And I'm appalled at how poorly I did with having read the small number of women on this list.

2011-07-09T16:02:00.003-04:00

David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 1997.

This collection of essays is my first foray into reading Wallace. I’ve been meaning to spend some time with his work for a while now, and am now both glad that I have and hoping to find more time to spend with Consider the Lobster and Infinite Jest.

The writing is fun: recursive, exuberant, given to marvellous and unexpected comparisons as a way of bringing a scene to life, and richly evocative: “an unshot skeet’s movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean’s sky is sun-like—i.e. orange and parabolic and right-to-left—and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.” What I found most remarkable were the two travel pieces, “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All” about the Illinois State Fair, and the title piece “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” about a Caribbean cruise. They feel at first like deeply personal travelogues, essays that describe the scene and bring you into the author’s experience complete with all his entertaining and identifiable neuroses, and seem to lack coherence other than that given by the passage of time. In reading them, though, I came to see that the seemingly-relaxed structure is a front: Wallace has very deliberate points about what it means to be human and what it means to experience, that are worth discovering in his meandering and footnoted-way. And oh, the footnotes ¹ in all their parenthetical and humorous delight, never detracting from the piece but always adding something. One has to read the footnotes!

The only piece in the collection I found myself skimming rather than reading was the essay on David Lynch, and while it examines what makes Lynch a different sort of auteur than many directors, my lack of familiarity with and interest in Lynch himself wasn’t overcome by Wallace’s engaging writing.

Captivating but difficult is the essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” a piece I wish I had read many years ago. Arguing that television exists as a medium wholly invested in irony, Wallace builds on the brilliant Lewis Hyde to argue “… irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks” and thus television can never be a truly effective tool for the novelist: authors of fiction have an obligation to use modern references, to be sure, but to transcend irony to create something else. He quotes Hyde’s idea from “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking” that “Irony has only emergence use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” I’m excerpting an idea from a complex piece, but it serves to present Foster Wallace as someone who, in this postmodern age, felt that fiction is more than a player in the great game of deconstruction.

I look forward to the next bit of time I’ll be able to spend with his writing.

¹ and the footnotes to the footnotes ²
² and so on

2011-07-08T10:53:00.003-04:00

Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles, 2010.

The Fry Chronicles picks up where Moab Is My Washpot left off, offering a vertiginous stream of wordplay and eloquence to describe a portion of Fry’s life—in this case, his years at university and just thereafter as he establishes his career. It ends just before Fry and Hugh Laurie are to begin a tour of England to prepare for A Bit of Fry and Laurie, and with the start of a new problem that we readers are to assume will challenge Fry’s life for some time to come.

Fry writes his story lightly, interspersed with understandable but too frequent heavy-handed apologies for the what- some-might-consider-trivial woes that mark his life story. Except for these asides, his writing is deeply engaging. We are immersed first in the world of Cambridge, and learn how he finds his way into the Footlights, and then brought into the world of television in London (and radio, and magazines, and musicals). Characteristic throughout is his sense of discomfort in his environs, always suspecting that he’ll be found out to have less talent than he has been credited with by others, and it’s this feeling that gives plot to what is otherwise a fairly linear string of events in Fry’s life. Told otherwise, his biography would seem nearly golden: despite a few expulsions and an arrest for credit card fraud, he attends Queens’ College, Cambridge, and then soars to a magnificent career as an entertainer, earning and receiving opportunity after chance and indulging tastes for cars and computers along the way. Yet this insecurity never distanced me from Fry as I read: it’s the signature element of who he is, rather than an affectation, and I found it both endearing and easy to identify with.

I’ll look forward to the next volume.

2010-12-30T13:29:00.001-05:00

Craig Ferguson, American On Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot, 2009.

I’m not sure what attracted me to Ferguson’s autobiography: I’m a fan neither of celebrity autobiographies nor of addiction memoirs, but something made me want to read this one. I’m glad I did. Ferguson’s self-deprecating humour and wry observations combine with a level of candour and openness that make for an engaging personal history. We meet his parents and his family, and learn of his yearning to be American (with a very sweet NASA story along the way), before following him into a descent into alcoholism and drumming. Fans of The Late Late Show won’t be surprised that he learns that he loves to make people laugh, leading to a career in both stand-up and film before getting sober with the help of some friends, with a first American sojourn along the way. (It is astonishing to read of both the depths of his alcoholism and his ability to remain employed.) Finally, he finds his way to LA and projects in both film and television, before landing his current gig. There’s a sweetness to the book and its stories, even when Ferguson is sharing his fear of ducks brought on by a bad acid trip (a story that’s changed and reworked in his novel, Between the Bridge and the River, blogged about here). There’s also no shortage of can-do American Dream-fulfilled optimism that shapes the telling. What you’ll read is entirely congruent with the voice you may have experienced when the sandman’s at your door and you’re watching his show anyway, and it will entertain you even as it speaks revealingly about addiction and how Ferguson has addressed it in his life.

2010-12-27T22:36:00.003-05:00

Craig Ferguson, Between the Bridge and the River, 2006.

Ferguson’s first novel is a road-trip good-time, a weird and wacky series of pastiches that is strongly reminiscent of the work of both Douglas Adams and Tom Robbins. Ostensibly the stories of two Glaswegians who were once friends, the story careens off into strange asides and amusing characters that one might well meet in Ferguson’s comedy (and bits and pieces from Ferguson’s own life, as you’ll discover in my next blog post on his American on Purpose). We follow George, a defence lawyer dying of cancer who falls in love, and Fraser, a disgraced televangelist seeking escape at a conference of his brother televangelists in the deep South. Along the way we meet the morbidly obese and extensively depraved Saul and his brother Leon, the singer cum actor. We meet crack-heads, anorexics, and snake handlers, and are reminded that bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly... and yet they do. Oh, and Carl Jung and Virgil are key figures, too. It’s a wise-cracking tour de force that touches on sex, suicide, addiction, sex, the stories that trap us, sex, and a deeply humane view of what it should mean to us to lead our lives. From chase-like sequences in RVs to the retelling of the story of St. Francis of Assisi, Ferguson’s writing is deeply entertaining and moving, never stepping away from a sharp comedic outlook while sharing interesting asides on myoclonic twitches and the etymology of “cutting to the chase”. The book is at its best in the set pieces, and three morality tales are particularly strong. It’s well worth a read: you’ll not regret it, in your own time between the bridge and the river.

2010-11-22T07:16:00.002-05:00

Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, 2010.

The lights lower in the house, and the screen brightens. Two or three commercials play across the screen as you lean over to your fellow cinema-goer to bet on how many trailers you’ll see, and before the first trailer seeks to tempt you into watching a movie that you have no interest in seeing, one final commercial plays: a young person in a convenience store shoves a couple of candy bars and a pop into his knapsack as the storekeeper sells a lottery ticket to an elderly woman, and then the boy takes off, high-tailing it from the store as the narrator’s deep voice says “We know that’s theft—so is stealing movies” as we cut to a young couple staring at a computer whilst slyly grinning at one another. My stomach tightens at the commercial, though I’ve never illegally downloaded a movie. While I could argue against the false equivalence being established in the efforts of this commercial and its brethren, nothing I could essay would be as erudite, as engaging, or as convincing as Lewis Hyde’s recent Common as Air.

Just as in Trickster Makes This World*, Hyde uses analogies and discursive examples to outline an argument that is very difficult to argue against convincingly. In Common as Air, he argues that copyright is broken: that what once existed to help the development of art and discovery now limits and prevents meaningful building on the “shoulders of giants” that have gone before. He proposes reform, asking us to move away from the notion of property to a commons with stints. Hyde develops this proposal with heavy reference both to the ancient structures and strictures of the commons and to the founding fathers or the United States. At times heavily historical, the reader would be forgiven for thinking in the early pages that she was reading more of an history of ideas than a book dealing with what may be the defining issue of our time. The fifth chapter makes heavy use of Benjamin Franklin to show how his work on a number of scientific fronts could not have occurred without heavy debts both to earlier investigations whose results had been freely shared and to his oft-forgotten co-experimenters. Its argument is that the “founders believed that created works belong largely in the commons so as to support and enliven creative communities” (112); the preceding chapters develop our understanding of the commons, and the successive chapters expand this idea and show how it has continuing relevance to our society and culture, with reference to Bob Dylan, the human genome, and the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., among others. Hyde captivates the reader both in the argument itself and in his myriad and surprising examples. Dealing carefully with both issues of law and culture, the arguments he makes are persuasive and intriguing. The sceptic—who is willing to agree that theft is theft, and copyright works just fine, thank you—will find himself challenged, and the already converted will need to nuance her arguments in the light of Hyde’s work.

What I find most compelling in Hyde’s new book is an essential underpinning of his argument. A serious problem that our contemporary culture faces is that we tend to conceive of freedom as negative: too often we are concerned about being free from infringements by others. Hyde shows that this way of thinking is backwards when compared with the bulk of thinking about freedom through time.

Social well-being in this view cannot arise simply by aggregating individual choices; private interest and public good are too often at odds. Citizens acquire virtue in the civic republic, therefore, not by productivity but by willingly allowing self-interest to bow to the public good (or by recognizing that the two are one). (93)

True liberty is not freedom from, but rather freedom for, a liberty that is entirely congruent with what is extolled in the Magnificat, for example. I need to spend more time thinking about how Hyde’s arguments are working on my own understanding of what it is to live in the communities in which I make my home.

My sole serious quibble with the book is composed of two lines on the frontispiece: “Copyright © 2010 by Lewis Hyde / All rights reserved.” After he so extolled the virtues of Creative Commons licenses, was there an effort to persuade Farrar, Strauss and Giroux to publish Common as Air under such a license?

* I first fell in love with Hyde’s writing when reading his magnificent Trickster Makes This World. If you haven’t read it, I remind you that old time is still a-flying.)

2010-11-21T16:49:00.001-05:00

Giles Blunt, Crime Machine, 2010.

The newest entry in Blunt’s Detective Cardinal mystery series does not disappoint: it’s a taught, well-plotted murder mystery. Despite some predictable plot twists (who’d have thought that the ignored cold case, the butt of so many jokes, would shed light on the main case—other than every intelligent reader?), the milieu of Algonquin Bay and the always enjoyable and, this time, following his wife’s murder, the especially vulnerable Detective Cardinal. The mysterious crime scene with the beheaded Russian furriers, possibly with a Mafia connection, combined with the clear signs of presence of another mysterious person at the crime scene ties in with local politics and marital discord, all lead to the reader’s enjoyment at Blunt’s deft handling of the multiple strands he weaves together. The challenging aspect of the book is the same issue as I had with Blackfly Season (two books back in the series): because Blunt gives us much of the criminal’s perspective, we see deep and peculiar brutalities and odd character studies that detract from the mystery but fail to add a significant thriller component. Despite this weakness in writing, I continue to enjoy Blunt’s books, and look forward to the next Cardinal outing.

2010-11-10T21:39:00.003-05:00

Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi), 1943. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston, 1969.

The Glass Bead Game was a revelation to me in high school: it was a tome that made sense of life, that drew me toward academia and study in what I now know was a dramatically over-idealised way. Given its importance to the earlier me, I’m surprised that, until this fall, my copy has been sitting on shelves, un-reread, the story only half-remembered.

Hesse’s novel follows Joseph Knecht, a young man who is so dedicated to his music that he is plucked from his virtually un-described normal life and sent to the elite schools in Castalia—the region where the real scholars are made. Hesse follows Knecht’s career through two sets of schools, and then into the “order” of scholars and his leadership position in the order. You now know almost everything that “happens”: this story is about ideas, and the reader experiences debates between characters and musings on knowledge, politics, social responsibility, the proper role of study to the state, and more.

There are some peculiar features to this book. I read it as a sort of gedankenexperiment, an attempt to dream as near-to-possible a utopia as might exist, complete with the challenges it would face in relating to the “real” world. The form of the book is also unusual: it’s almost an anthology. It begins with an introduction to the glass bead game (the central conceit of the book and Castalia, the game is an elaborate formal way of representing the inter-relationship of various aspects—well, of all aspects—of knowledge*), and continues with a dry, academic biography of Knecht with a tone that Hesse deliberately writes in a way that skirts close to hagiography. Then we have the poems Knecht wrote as a student, followed by three of his gedankenexperiments: imagined lives he might have lived in other times and places in the world. We learn much about Castalia, and it seems awfully close to the monastic scholarship ideal (so the scholars can have affairs in their youths, sure, but otherwise they’re celibate, and there’s a disturbing absence of women that is hard not to read as misogynistic in this era—strange that teenage me wasn’t disturbed or upset by that absence/misogyny). In fact, it veers so close that it’s really only possible to distinguish it because of an extended section of Knecht’s career when he’s sent to be a game tutor to a leading Benedictine monastery, to advance Castalia’s hopes of permanent relations with the Vatican.

It’s not a book one would pick up to be riveted by story, but in the extended character study, Hesse reveals in Knecht both an idealist and an ideal. We’re asked both to empathize with the kenosis of true scholarship and civic identity (reinforced by an opposing pair of friend and mentors: Tegularius, whom Hesse based on Nietzsche, who sees little of such responsibilities; and Father Jacobus, based on Jakob Burckhardt, who is the ideal monk and scholar. The universality of the individual’s struggle between these poles is revealed not just in Knecht, but also through Knecht’s ‘secular’ non-Castalian friend, Plinio Designori). We’re forced to engage with just how much an individual has an obligation to be true to himself, and at what cost, when part of society. It’s a theme we see in much of Hesse’s work, but in The Glass Bead Game it plays at a nearly constant fortissimo, unmuted by a need for story.

Just what did teenage me see in this book? I think it likely that I saw in it, in a way that I could articulate nor fully comprehend at the time, a paradox I couldn’t then resolve between creativity and scholarship, and found myself drawn to a place and milieu where I imagined I would be free to live in a way that could explore that paradox. Now, that’s a misreading of the book—Castalia and Knecht show little freedom from the world I remember in high school—but it’s what I half-remembered, before I reread The Glass Bead Game. It also explains why I was so fascinated by the I Ching after reading the book for the first time, given its allusive and elusive way of making sense of what is to come that functions in a book as a symbol of that paradox.

I’m less sure, outside of what’s certainly a more nuanced reading, what I got out of my reengagement with the text. There remains something seductive about the utopia of Castalia, and a slim desire to emulate Knecht (and a wishing that I lived his self-discipline!); at the same time, I find myself more intrigued by the gulf Hesse depicts between scholarship and the world: Castalia can exist after a long, nightmare-like period of war and desolation, but it’s an ill-understood beacon to the rest of the world: a place to be vaguely proud of in a nebulous way, without having any sense of what it’s actually for or about. Despite being on the other side of the “Age of the Feuilleton”, a time when people were more interested in crosswords and diversions than real learning, Castalia is more what lets the rest of the world claim they’ve moved past that age than the epitome of a shift of culture. Hesse’s prophetic (not forecasting, but prophecy à la the Hebrew Scriptures, warning of a loss of purpose, understanding, and right-living) depiction of the world is no less true of our time than it was of a world in the throes of the Second World War—and will likely continue to go unheard.

* Perhaps it was my fascination with the game that led me to become as fond as I am of the work of Northrop Frye: the game imagines that all aspects of human knowledge may be studied as a system, and that the interrelations may be displayed: this is strikingly close to Frye's concept of a verbal universe with a structure that it is the critic's job to study, describe, and comment upon.

2010-11-09T23:12:00.000-05:00

“Richard Castle”, Naked Heat, 2010.

The newest entry in the on-going saga of Richard Castle--sorry, of "Jameson Rook"--this novel is weaker than the last year's entry, Heat Wave. What worries me is why I think that's true. After all, this mystery is well-paced, and has some surprising twists and turns. It stands squarely in line with the TV series, with a similar sense of humour. Naked Heat and Heat Wave have clear similarities with episodes of Castle, with the same unfolding of the case, and characters who are in many ways much like Rick Castle and Detective Kate Beckett. So what's not to like? Well—that's the part that embarasses me. I don't think that the TV character Rick Castle would write like this. I think he'd be a better writer. I grant that's a pretty subjective judgement. Let me offer an example or two. On the first page, describing Nikki Heat, "Castle" writes: "She used the interlude to peel back the lid of her coffee to see if it was drinking temp yet." Castle's portrayed as a language geek on the show, someone who cares about how the English language is used: I simply can't imagine the character allowing "temp" to stay in a published copy of a book, rather than "temperature." Pedantic, on my part? Absolutely. More telling are the lines like this one:

The previous May, just days after he had returned to New York from Cannes, where he received a special jury prize for his role as the bastard son of France's first American ambassador, Reed Wakefield pulled a Heath Ledger and died of an accidental drug overdose. (129)

The overly long nature of the sentence is a stylistic issue; the tastelessness of the simile is egregious. If the simile was being used on the show — and it got past Standards and Practices to make it on the air, an idea I find hard to credit —I could imagine Nathan Fillion pulling it off with his insouciant charm. On the page, it doesn't work.

I've taken several days to wonder why I'm so disturbed by faults like these. (I've also taken several days to ponder instead of to blog, because my beloved has been reading it, and I haven't gotten my hands back on the copy to type out the examples I've used.) How much of my reaction is a fan-boy-esque disappointment in something that didn't live up to my expectations, and how much is something else? Does a television network publishing a book to help advertise a show have a responsibility to make the novel sound as though it was written by the character to whom it's ascribed? How much of my problem is that the mystery itself wasn't as good as Heat Wave? I'm finding these questions interesting, and I don't have clear answers. Despite the flaws in writing (and in not sounding enough like the Rick Castle I watch each Monday night), it's a decent little diversion. I can't imagine that anyone who picks it up is looking for anything remarkable--maybe its real purpose, other than advertising, is to let over-interested viewers leer voyeuristically at Castle's fantasies of a Beckett/Castle relationship, in the not-overly-disguised roman à clef fashion that these books offer.

I'm left disappointed, but more intrigued by my own reaction. The book itself reminds us of the importance of libraries; after all, it's certainly not worth the $24.99 US sticker price.

2010-11-08T23:26:00.002-05:00

Maureen Johnson,
Suite Scarlett, 2008
Scarlett Fever, 2010.

Why do teenagers and tweens read Twilight crap and other such things when they could read well-written, clever, and entertaining YA novels like Johnson’s? Who needs to worry about vampires and werewolves when one can wonder who will capture Scarlett’s heart? (Note no actual Twilight comparisons should be considered: the books referred to in this blog entry are good, and worth reading. And lack vampires. Deo gratias on both counts!)

Set in a New York that’s neither tourist-y (for the most part) nor exploited for fear or kitsch, Johnson’s stories of Scarlett Martin and her family are rollicking, funny, and engaging. Scarlett’s family runs the no-longer top-notch Hopewell hotel in Manhattan. As the first novel starts, Scarlett is, in the family tradition, given one of the Hopewell’s suites to care for; while it should have been more a formality than real work, the arrival of the mysterious and peculiar Mrs. Amberson changes Scarlett’s plans for how she was to spend that summer. Meanwhile, her brother Spencer is trying to make it as an actor, and the production of Hamlet in which he lands the role of Rosencrantz (or Guildenstern—I can't actually remember if it's specified, and the two roles are treated fairly interchangeably when the play takes the fore) is lacking a production space. Add the challenge of the younger sister, Marlene, who only likes the older sister Lola (who is herself in a confusing romantic space with her rich boyfriend). Toss together with the complications of Eric, the Guildenstern (or Rosencrantz), who may or may not have a thing for Scarlett, and you’ve got a recipe for mayhem, silliness, comedic timing, pratfalls, Shakespearean revenge subplots, and general fun that’s eminently enjoyable. The second novel follows in the series: new romantic interests, new familial complications, new wackiness-es with Mrs. Amberson (whose borrowed dog and put-upon doorman exist to provide set-pieces that Johnson handles deftly), plus school all combine to leave the reader wondering how Scarlett continues to stumble from one thing to the next.

Read. Enjoy. And for pity’s sake, if you see a young woman (or man) reading misogynistic Twilight crap, give her these instead: it’s more worth her time to have a plausible young woman who’s simultaneously strong and confused by life as a role model than simpering simpletons she’ll find in other books.

2010-11-07T14:30:00.002-05:00

Patricia Briggs, Silver Borne, 2010.

I blame Felicia Day and her twitter feed for my first reading Briggs and her series about a mechanic, Mercedes Thompson, who shifts into being a coyote and whose personal life is a little too intertwined with werewolves. In many ways, it’s very traditional fantasy: a great deal of thought has been put into the nature of werewolves and their pack dynamics (and their revelation of their existence to the wider world), into the fae, into witches and magic and vampires. Underlying each novel to date in the series (and I don’t seem to have blogged about them, but have read each one—embarrassment?) is an acknowledged debt to existing mythology and a clever attempt to update it and bring it into our own world. Its weaknesses, as a series, stem from another convention of too much of contemporary fantasy: the novels verge too often on slipping into the harlequin-esque romance style, and the depth of reliance on mythology and the sheer creativity of the milieu Mercedes inhabits is the saving grace.

This novel is the fifth in the series (after Moon Crossed, Blood Bound, Iron Kissed, and Bone Crossed), and is not my favourite of the lot. Its plot revolves around an attempt on Mercy’s life, fae who want an object in her possession, werewolves trying to upset the pack dynamics, and a werewolf on the verge of ending his life. The elements of the plot fail to cohere sufficiently well: ideas are introduced but not sustained, and emerge later, half-forgotten. The entire suplot of the werewolf unhappy with his existence is weak and implausible given what we know of him from the other books in the series. Finally, the denouement is so scattered and diffuse that it feels like Ms. Briggs simply didn’t know how to bring the story to a successful conclusion. I do hope that the next volume returns to the quality of the earlier books in this series.

2010-11-06T14:24:00.002-04:00

Garrison Keillor, Life Among the Lutherans, 2009.

A collection of short pieces, some of the tales and anecdotes in this book are familiar and others are obscure. Many will know “The Young Lutheran’s Guide to the Orchestra” and “Pontoon Boat”, but “Ministers’ Retreat” and “Lorraine Turnblad’s Tombstone” are far less well known. Each story has its particular Woebegon-ian charm, and it’s an enjoyable book. My sole complaint is that, aside from Woebegon and/or vague references to Lutherans, the book suffers from a lack of organization: it’s not structured, even moving through seasons, and so it really is a book to pick up at discrete intervals. The reader is left only with a sense of the milieu, both of Lake Woebegon and, to a lesser extent, of the midwestern Lutheran mores of which Keillor is the principal hagiographer (or idolater?). It’s an enjoyable read, marked principally by moments of quiet hopefulness about the capacity (too rarely reached) of humans to offer and receive love in meaningful ways.

2010-10-30T16:33:00.003-04:00

Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, 2010.

I picked up this book after seeing it mentioned first on Salon, and then in more detail on Languagehat at this post and then (having myself nearly finished reading the book) at this post. I can’t say that I would have gravitated toward it otherwise: I don’t know why I needed the persuasion, but that Languagehat post convinced me that I would enjoy the book.

The book is a series of essays. Mostly structured around particular Russian books, each essay reveals a great detail about both Batuman’s life and approach to reading and the alternate universe that is graduate school. Isaac Babel serves as the lens for the first essay; the second, fourth, and sixth essays are built around learning Uzbek in Samarkand. The third essay revolves around a trip to Tolstoy’s estate for a conference (her school offering a $1 000 grant for presenting a paper at a conference, and $2 500 grant for research, Batuman applied for the latter, with a proposal to prove that Tolstoy was murdered: a neat idea, but seen through by her graduate school). The fifth piece uses Lazhechnikov’s House of Ice and visits the recreated Ice Palace. The seventh, which gives the collection its name, is about Dostoevsky’s Demons (formerly translated as The Possesed).

Because of their personal nature, the essays are sometimes meandering and lose focus. The Samarkand sections, likely because they’ve been broken up into three pieces separated by two other essays, feel disconnected from much of the rest of the book. While many of the essays do give the feeling of being almost a travelogue at times, they’re not trying to describe a place or even trips: rather, they’re giving a sense of literature and life. They do feel like pieces for The New Yorker, and her work has been published in those august pages.

There are moments which are quite funny, and others which are pathetic (the realisation of what her language and literature teachers in Samarkand are being paid, compared to the remuneration for the University’s rector and her host, is deeply affecting). Occasionally, those two are combined, as the Tolstoy scholars travel to Chekhov’s house and back to their respective institutions. The description of graduate school rings sadly true, though Batuman finds more humour (even if she does so darkly) than I did in my experiences.

I thoroughly enjoyed the collection. I do agree with Languagehat’s conclusion about the unrelenting focus on the exotic, though I wonder if perhaps that’s how to hold the general public’s attention while writing about books most people are unlikely to read in their lives. I do have a renewed desire to finishing reading Dead Souls one of these years...

2010-10-30T13:52:00.000-04:00

Ben Karlin (ed.), Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me, 2008.

This book is an anthology of comedic pieces from Andy Richter, Will Forte, David Wain, Stephen Colbert (heavily censored), Dan Savage, AJ Jacobs, Patton Oswalt, and others. The title gives you a good sense of the subject matter: every piece is somehow about break-ups and past relationships. Unsurprisingly, they’re variable in quality and humour. The essays from Savage, Jacobs, and Colbert were my favourites. Savage thanks an ex for helping him to realise his own sexuality; Colbert shares (and his wife censors) a reminiscence of a former lover; Jacobs recalls the woman he wanted to date but never could. Each one writes in his distinctive style and with the clever humour the reader expects.

It’s a book that you can enjoy some essays from, be surprised and perhaps discover comedians in others, while not feeling guilty about skimming over the pieces that don’t hold your attention.

2010-10-30T13:36:00.002-04:00

John Green, Maureen Johnson, Lauren Myracle, Let it Snow, 2008.

This collection of three interlinked “holiday romances” is a slight but enjoyable YA piece. All three pieces are fairly conventional in plotting and characterization. I’m not sure if they simply didn’t find enough space, or if the teenage romance genre in which they’re writing precluded surprises. The reader won’t find anything new in the pieces, but they’re an enjoyable enough diversion.

Johnson’s piece, “The Jubilee Express”, traces a holiday journey taken by a young woman following her parents’ arrest: hijinks, train delays, Waffle Houses, and irritatingly absent and just plain irritating boyfriends all serve to advance the plot as she finds unexpected romance. Green’s tale, "A Cheertastic Christmas Miracle", follows three friends trying to get to that same Waffle House, to meet a coworker and the sudden arrival of a cheerleading squad. Love is found in unexpected places. Myracle’s story, "The Patron Saint of Pigs", is the most adventurous of the three stories, following a rather self-absorbed young woman who seeks to make amends after having cheated on her boyfriend.

I picked it up solely because I enjoy Green, and am coming to appreciate Johnson: it’s a divertissement, rather than anything substantial—and I’m clearly not in the target audience for this piece.

2010-10-07T22:30:00.002-04:00

David Rakoff, Half Empty, 2010.

I love Rakoff’s writing. I love the way he uses words, the way his delightfully snarky and snide humour enchant the reader and hide Rakoff’s love of the truth he’s writing about, the way I laugh, the way I want to read slowly so that the book will last longer, the way I hear the words in his soft voice and careful inflections. I love Rakoff’s writing, and that makes it hard to write about it any sort of balanced way.

In ten essays, Rakoff jumps from the trouble with Rent and cupcakes to the disturbing cultural insistence that people remain positive even in extreme adversity, with trips to Epcott, Hollywood, and Utah for good measure. His eye is so attuned to both the quotidian and the extraordinary, and he describes it concisely and movingly: he captures experiences in words in ways that inspire me to write (ironically, given the example I’m about to share). Consider this depiction of what the process of writing is like:

It isn't that I don't sympathize with the lassitude. I understand it all too well. Creativity demands an ability to be with oneself at one's least attractive, that sometimes it's just easier not to do anything. Writing--I can really only speak to writing here--always, always starts out as shit: an infant of monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible, and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometimes forever). Unlike cooking, for example, where largely edible, if raw, ingredients are assembled, cut, heated, and otherwise manipulated into something both digestible and palatable, writing is closer to having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food. So truly, if you're already getting laid and have managed to fall in with an attractive and like-minded group without the added indignity of diving face-first into a cesspool every single time you sit down to work, no one understands better than I do why one might not bother. (55)

His metaphors and similes are staggering. He makes an entrepreneur at the Exotic Erotic Ball convention come alive with associations that are at once cliché and fresh: “Decades ago, he would have been a grizzled huckster, an old merchant seaman with fading Polynesian tattoos and missing teeth, producing from his rucksack a cork-stoppered bottle of brown glass. He would whisper of the mysterious contents, a vague pedigree of ground horn, dried animal penis, and the pulverized carapaces of rare insects.”

Rakoff doesn’t write about himself, but he’s present in every essay with an unflinching honesty that makes me want to invite him for dinner (and worry about living up to his standards for both the food and the décor). Describing his response and reaction to his therapist’s death, Rakoff invites one into both the therapy and the hospice room: the emotions are vivid and revealing, necessary and clarifying. My best way of making sense of it is to suggest that Rakoff uses his own life as a prism to reveal the colours that seemed to just be life, refracting the beam to make details come alive so that deeper truths about ourselves can be understood.

Perhaps most helpful and most challenging is the final essay, ‘Another Shoe,’ in which he shares something of his experience with his recent (and ongoing) bout with cancer. He remembers a woman, Brooklyn Mom, with whom he once volunteered, and describes the process of coming to understand what she chose to share about her experience with cancer; he remembers an awkward childhood experience that informs his feelings in the present; of his sense of a lack of larger lessons in the midst of this all-consuming experience. In both his references to movies and books and in the interactions with friends, family, and his own self, Rakoff depicts bleakness and the slight hope that makes continuing possible.

I’m hoping for the next collection of essays. I’m sure I’ll be as effusive again.

2010-10-06T22:29:00.000-04:00

Hillary Frank, The View From the Top, 2010.

Enjoyable and sweet, Frank’s latest novel is a multi-vocal exploration of the angst that exists around topics of love, future, and family. Though it stays in third-person narration with a consistent voice, the story jumps in focus from one character to another. Despite their interactions and the inter-related nature of each character’s story, there aren’t clear links between the sections: this stylistic device serves to heighten the feelings of isolation and confusion that are the principal source of unity for the overarching story.

We follow Anabelle, who is about to leave for university from the tourist town in which she’s grown up. She struggles with her relationship with her boyfriend Matt, and her feelings for his best friend Jonah. Matt’s sister Lexi is pining for Anabelle, as is Jonah—but Jonah is also drawn to Matt and Lexi’s mom. At the outskirts of this circle is Tobin, a brilliant cellist who likes Anabelle and is about to leave Normal, ME, to head to conservatory. Tacked on in a way that doesn’t quite succeed is Mary-Tyler, one of the tourists whose parents have a vacation home in Normal: she felt to my reading more of a character like an attendant lord meant to swell a progress, start a scene or two and her sections read as nearly extraneous and fall flat compared to the remainder of the novel.

In describing Frank’s writing of Mary-Tyler, I realised what falls flat for me in with this novel. Despite enjoying it, I found myself distracted by the vital importance of minor characters to the denouement of the plot: we simply don’t know them well enough to be moved, and I felt manipulated in the closing as I read of Anabelle’s father’s crying. This challenge is compounded with the over-easy dismissal of the other characters’ conclusions—Jonah being chased through the fair and Matt heading off to Boston—and the overly neat resolution between Anabelle and Tobin. I found myself disappointed by the conclusion, despite enjoying the book through the rest of my reading of it. I’ve always felt weak conclusions to otherwise strong stories to be an unintentional betrayal of the contract between reader and story-teller, so it’s taken me a few days to sit down to blog about this novel. Ultimately, I’m glad I read it, but didn’t enjoy it nearly so much as I did Better than Running at Night. Frank has a great gift for drawing her readers into her stories. I’m hoping that her next book will leave me as content through its conclusion as through its middle.

2010-09-16T21:14:00.003-04:00

Hillary Frank, Better than Running at Night, 2002.

I love a good künstlerroman. I discovered Frank via This American Life, and a brilliant piece about a conversation overheard on a train ride. (You can stream it from here.) Better than Running at Night is her debut novel, a quick-moving character study of a young woman named Ladybug (Ellie) Yellinsky. Ellie is beginning her studies at the New England College of Art and Design (this is my only quibble: the school name is clever, no? NECAD—said phonetically, as her father does, it reveals both themes and endings just a little too clearly) mid-year, taking a fundamentals class in order to catch up with her fellow students who began the year in September. She struggles with making sense of what art is, both with her oddball teacher Ed Gilloggley and her two fellow class-mates — and then the next oddball non-teacher. At the same time, Ellie is figuring out what it is to live; she’s in a complicated relationship with another student, is trying to make sense of her relationships with her parents, and is trying to understand who she is, post-high school.

Told in short snippets, and illustrated by Frank’s drawings (she holds an MFA in drawing from the New York Academy of Art), the book is engaging. I read it in just a few short hours, drawn into both Ellie’s life and the lucid exposition of what art is and how the artist works and grows.

My summary might make the novel sound overly familiar, solidly placed within a predictable genre. It’s not: Ellie’s travails and woes never feel trite or overdone, but are entirely plausible. There’s a marvellous moment when Gilloggley shows his three students some of his own drawings in charcoal:

The last slide was of a woman lying on her stomach in bed, partially draped by a sheet. It was a side view, and one arm hung limply over the edge of the bed. A single finger grazed the floor. The arm said everything about how she felt.
After seeing Ed’s slides, I knew why I had come to art school. (182)

The book seeks to use Ellie’s life to make sense of art and life in a way much akin to Ed’s work; revealing Ellie’s emotions and response, her yearning to create, and her desire for a fulfilled life. It resists easy endings, and indeed resists offering detail after the dénouement. It’s a well written, lovely novel; I look forward to reading more of Frank’s work.

2010-09-10T21:33:00.001-04:00

Christopher Moore,
   Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story, 1995.
   You Suck, 2007.
   Bite Me, 2010.

mmmm… silly fun. The story of Bloodsucking Fiends follows Jody as she becomes a vampire. She finds a minion, Tommy—and wacky misadventures happen as they elude the vampire who turned her. Together with his drug-addled supermarket night crew, Tommy helps Jody deal with the older vampire while also avoiding the long arm of the law (the capable Rivera and Cavuto) and getting some helpful assistance from the Emperor of San Francisco, Protector of Alcatraz, Sausalito, and Treasure Island (and the men, of course!). Hijinks, silly humour, turtles being bronzed, some crazed vampiric sex. All’s well that ends well — thank goodness for the bronizing process — and then... Well, then the story continues the next day in You Suck. Tommy, now a vampire, helps Jody find a new minion: Abby Normal. Wacky misadventures with the old vampire seeking revenge, the night-crew trying to avenge Tommy’s turning while paying off their blue-dyed prostitute, and too many vampires threaten to make San Francisco un-fun. Abby and her science nerd boyfriend save the day in then end... and then the story continues in the newly released Bite Me. While you might think vampire-animals were sufficiently covered by James Howe — well, actually, you’d be right. In this book of the trilogy, the silliness is a bit over the top. A vampire cat is one thing, but vampire parrots, Rastafarian boat pilots, older vampires, and vampire fog viruses is a well-plotted adventure tale that jumps from the viewpoint of one character to another and another, but never really grips the reader the way the first two books do.

All three are fun, silly, light reading. These books are the sort of summer pulp that’s worth using for entertainment. And leave me with a strange craving to find my copy of Bunnicula...

2010-09-07T20:41:00.002-04:00

Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job, 2006.

When I pick up a book by Christopher Moore, I expect to be entertained, and, every other book*, stretched a bit. A Dirty Job does a decent job on both fronts. Its plot revolves around a man who becomes an agent of Death, and who becomes responsible to collect souls and facilitate their transference to their new people (it seems we outgrow and change souls as we ourselves develop, much as we do shoes; I’m not clear if we can wear them out). This being Moore, there’s wackiness &mdash some poignant, some farcical — as beta male Charlie Asher makes sense of his new vocation. He comes to it just after the death of his wife Rachel and the birth of his daughter Sophie. It’s a story populated with weird characters (and with strong links to some of Moore’s other books and characters, most notably an interaction that also appears in You Suck) and ferocious villains working against Charlie. Interwoven are thoughts and reflections on death, ranging from the Lovecraft-esque to a deep fascination with the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

It’s a set-up with promise that ultimately doesn’t live up to the depth of Lamb or the humour of Bloodsucking Fiends. My problem with the novel is that its plotting at some times clearly telegraphs revelations that need to be less-guess-able, and at other times resorts to such exotic (and small and furry) deus ex machinas as to so stretch the suspension of disbelief I was willing to extend to a book about a man who becomes a “death merchant.” There are some brilliant set pieces — both times Charlie is tied up are marvellous, as is the introduction of the hellhounds — but it doesn’t quite maintain the level of humour in the lighter books. It’s worth reading, and offers a noble paean to hospice care workers, but if you’ve read Lamb, you’ll be left wishing for a bit more after reading it. Memorable line: "I like my tea like I like my men [...] Weak and geen."

* I enjoyed listening to Moore speak with Edward Champion on this episode of The Bat Segundo Show. Its inside-baseball talk about what it is to be a popular-fiction writer is riveting and I encourage you to listen to it. In it, Moore reveals that he has made an interesting deal with his publisher: instead of writing a book a year, he’ll write four books in four years — two in six months and two in eighteen months. The result is some novels he considers lighter (You Suck is one example), and some that have the benefit of more thought and research (Lamb, A Dirty Job). It’s interesting to know about this calculated way of writing, and it doesn’t detract one iota from the six-month books.

2010-09-06T22:00:00.003-04:00

David Rakoff,
Fraud 2001
Don’t Get Too Comfortable 2005.

I reread Don’t Get Too Comfortable, which book I first blogged about in April of 2007, and then read Fraud. Such marvellous vacation reading. I won’t quibble with what I wrote previously about DGTC — it’s a marvellous collection. The distinction I tried to make, three years ago, about acerbity without meanness is well captured in Ira Glass’s blurb for Fraud:

It’s hard to come up with a pithy remark for the back of this book, knowing that the author could — in half the time and a third of words — come up with something funnier, more piercing, and more deeply revealing. Like a whore with a heart of gold, David Rakoff says all the nasty things we want to hear and then reveals, after we’ve paid our money, that actually it’s all about love.

Glass captures it: while bits and pieces that I read aloud variously made my beloved laugh, or frown and say “he’s kind of a jackass”, Rakoff is always striving to show us more about ourselves and our habits. If you read an entire piece, you never leave it feeling he's a jackass — rather, I came to admire an honesty I wish I was better at mustering. I think that his especial skills is revealing and then mocking the habitual ways of perceiving the world that we take for granted, unwilling or unable to see that there are other avenues to experience what is around us. Fraud is less polished, and has more clever ideas that seem clever (I want to visit the Christmas Freud, and tell Rakoff what I want for Christmas only to be told in return the ways my “wishes are unhealthy or wished for in error”) than is DGTC. Both are so readable, so illuminating, that I kept wanting to read just one more essay before bed.

Rakoff's new book, Half Empty, is due out on September 21st: I’m looking forward to it.

2010-08-25T22:22:00.004-04:00

David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, 2010.

Orito, a character in this riveting and sprawling novel from David Mitchell, suggests that we cannot live without stories: “The belly craves food, the tongue craves water, the heart craves love and the mind craves stories.” Perhaps it’s because I agree so completely that I love this new book; perhaps it’s because I agree that I am one of legion who think Mitchell is the greatest living writer in English. (There is no one else from whom a new book would ensure me being at the bookstore the day of its release.) This novel is well worth reading, and I encourage you to spend time in its world.

Its world is that of Dejima, an artificial island off the coast of Nagasaki. Here the employees of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) live and work, forbidden from actually landing on the soil of Japan itself because of its strict policy of isolation at the dawn of the nineteen century, far from both the Netherlands and the VOC headquarters at Batavia (now Jakarta). To conniving, whoring, drinking, scheming, and defrauding that marks Dejima’s occupants comes the young and devout clerk Jacob De Zoet. Tasked first with identifying the corruption, Jacob is not in a position to make friends: he is determined merely to survive his five years and return to Holland to marry the girl he loves.

The island swarms with Japanese inspectors and translators, and much of the first section of the book details both daily life on the island and the diplomatic posturing between the VOC and the Edo magistracy in Nagasaki. Jacob is caught up in the intrigue of his superiors and by his own crush on an unobtainable young Japanese woman, Orito, who is apprenticed as a midwife to the Dutch doctor Marinus. The writing is lush: it is both cinematic in sweep and playful with the words themselves. There’s a marvellous set-piece, early on, in which Jacob chases a monkey who has stolen a leg from the surgeon through a warehouse; if you’re not at once laughing with mirth and astonished at Mitchell’s writing, then this book is not for you.

The second part of the book revolves around Orito’s life once relegated by her stepmother to an isolated monastery of stunning and revolting depravity. I found the shift startling as I read the book; yet in retrospect, it works well both to further the plot and to develop the ideas of isolation and of faith and scientific development with which Mitchell is playing. This portion of the book is deeply disturbing, and I found it challenging to read because of my emotional involvement in Orito and her would-be rescuer.

In the final portion, we (mostly) return to Dejima, now threatened by a British warship whose captain seeks to oust the Dutch and to establish trading relations with the Japanese (inspired by an historical incident). With echoes of Patrick O’Brian, we readers follow the events that are simultaneously inevitable and surprising. I rushed on to the end, reading until well past two—unready to leave the world of the novel and unwilling its end.

Near the end of the book is a set piece I have to share, so evocative and poetic is its writing:

Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike topped walls, and triple-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas, and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunch-backed makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed from kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries’ vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bath-house adulterers, heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerel on slabs; woodcutters’ sons sharpening axes; candlemakers rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etiolated lacquerers; mottled-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and aging rakes by other men’s wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil; gatekeepers; beekeepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses; perjurers; cutpurses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony of the Room of Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night's rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.

One could enumerate the various ways Mitchell brings the reader to consider the nature of isolation, from islands to language to social positions to the very idea of the foreign and so many more. This concern is central in my reading of Mitchell: consider any of the various narrators in Cloud Atlas, or Jason Tyler in Black Swan Green. I’m looking forward to rereading Thousand Autumns in a year or so to see if I can pin down some of my own thoughts on what Mitchell is accomplishing with this recurrent motif. It’s more developed, in this novel; it feels more visceral than it does in the recent past of Black Swan Green or the dystopian futures of Cloud Atlas, as if better capturing the malaise so endemic to contemporary life precisely because of the historical setting.

There’s another point upon which I offer only the briefest of comments, and cite a quotation and an event from the novel. While at times seemingly opposing faith and science, there’s a deep reverence and faithfulness that is staggering. “Hell is hell because, there, evil passes unremarked upon.” Nearing the end of the novel, facing the canon, as Jacob and Dr. Marinus together recite a psalm, I nearly wept.

This book also revolves around artistry. One might think Mitchell a devotee of Frye, when De Zoet answers the magistrate’s questions about Greek myths by saying that the “truth of a myth, Your Honor, is not in its words but its patterns.” (In and of itself, this line should be a sharp rebuke to some reviewers who have worried over anachronisms rather than engaging the story.) The patterns of this book are recognisable, unexpected in the encounter but not in reflection. To offer just one other example of the lingering concern for art Mitchell interweaves into the story, in a disturbing setting and moment of the story, a monk remarks that “Storytellers are not priests who commune with an ethereal realm but artisans, like dimpling makers, if somewhat slower” (perhaps warning us not to expect Mitchell’s next novel in the very near future). As Mitchell considers memory and experience, how we frame and create stories (and our deep, deep need for them), one could read the book as a manifesto about art

I hope you enjoy the novel; I hope you become one of the legion who marvel at Mitchell’s writing. “The belly craves food, the tongue craves water, the heart craves love and the mind craves stories.” May you leave the novel with cravings well satiated.

2010-08-23T13:10:00.000-04:00

Julian Barnes, England, England!, 1998.

I reread this novel by Barnes for reasons I cannot clearly explain: sometimes books on the shelves issue calls of loneliness that work their way subliminally to my impulses, asking me to return to worlds and characters and ideas that have grown only faintly familiar. I first read this book in graduate school, when it was recommended to us by the prof for whom I was TA-ing after a discussion on Baudrillard. He suggested—accurately, to my mind—that it would give the reader Baudrillard’s ideas without the lack of fun that accompanies reading Baudrillard (see Browning’s “Development” for a better expression of why this system is actually good pedagogy).

I remembered England, England! as a funny book, one that played with what England was while exploring the idea of the simulacrum and our own living with simulacra. What I didn’t remember was the anger, the ire more akin to a Juvenalian satire than to the Menippean satire I remembered. The plot revolves around a plan to turn the Isle of Wight into a tourist destination: all of the great historical events and places of England will be recreated in better ways, perfect for the quick and unthreatening encounter with history by monied tourists. The structure of the novel is somewhat awkward. The first segment recounts the development of the idea, dominated by the eccentric and forceful billionaire behind the project. The second relates his ouster and the running of England, England!—and the challenges that ensue: the smugglers start smuggling, Robin Hood is mad that Maid Marian won’t put out, and no one actually enjoys with a Dr. Johnson more remarkable for his depression than his witty aperçus, with a host of similar problems to accompany the aforementioned. The new CEO, a woman we readers got to know and like in both the prologue and the first part of the book, struggles both with how to solve the problems and with her own philosophical musings about what the immersion in the milieu is doing to the humans who are coming to over-identify the parts they play. (This latter concern expresses something I often wonder about: what must it do to actors to play roles like Iago day in and day out?) The final segment deals with her life after her own ouster and exile, a return to England (now Anglia) now depressed and restored to an agrarian pastoral idyll that itself is a simulacrum.

It’s in the final segment that the writing finds a balance that I think works; the satire is less angry but still omnipresent, as the villagers re-invent a fair that never-was but is as-they-imagine-it was—England, England! come to England, without the residents paid or paying for the privilege.

The book is not my favourite of Barnes’ oeuvre. It lacks the balance of Flaubert’s Parrot and the staying power of Talking It Over, or the genius of the brilliant A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. The exposition of the theories of Baudrillard, both by the French theorist and by Dr. Max, does not read like a theory lesson but does genuinely engage the reader at the level of story. I enjoyed rereading it, and am left wondering about the rage I perceive in it. Thoughts?

2010-08-22T21:26:00.003-04:00

Andrew Burnham, Heaven and Earth in Little Space: The Re-enchantment of Liturgy, 2010.

The state of the liturgy isn’t what it should be, argues Bishop Andrew Burnham in this new book. I came to read this book after reading Dr. Martin Davie’s review, posted on Bishop David Hamid’s blog in April. In what is a collection of six essays looking at different expressions of the same theme, Burnham tries to describe what has been lost and what renewal might look like from a committed Anglo-Catholic perspective. Variable in quality, the book is often highly technical and of interest principally to liturgical scholars rather than the general reader; moreover, the examples of contemporary Anglican liturgy are necessarily limited to the Church of England. While fascinating and erudite, I have trouble accepting one of Burnham’s underlying premises, that the decline in church attendance over the past few decades is attributable to either simplification of liturgy or attenuation of Catholic principles. Correlation is not the same thing as causation.

The first essay shows that the rites of the Church of England are essentially reformed in character, and not catholic. Burnham traces the development and evolution of both the Eucharist and the offices (the former in much greater detail), and makes a convincing argument. One of the points in this piece recurs in various forms throughout the other essays. He argues that while recent reforms have made the surface view of the rites look more catholic, the wide variability and choice permitted in their enactment force the worshipper to have what is a reformed experience. This argument is suspect, to my mind: here, as throughout the book, Burnham returns to asserting that the only possible identification of something as Catholic is a continuity with long-standing uses so deep as to prevent the possibility of any meaningful inculturation or development. I have trouble differentiating his view from a celebration of stasis, or at least of change so minimal and glacial as to be unidentifiable as renewal. (It’s hard to see how Burnham and George Guiver might ever agree on these points, and I find Guiver far more persuasive: see Guiver's Vision Upon Vision: Processes of Change and Renewal in Christian Worship.) Catholicism is not stasis; if our faith is alive, its expression in worship will change over time. Certainly it will always value and celebrate tradition, but to quote the old saw, tradition lies in handing over the flame, not praying over the ashes.

The second essay is an interesting assessment of the state of the two rites of the Eucharist currently in widespread use in the Roman Catholic church.

In his third essay, “Fast or Feast,” Burnham advocates strongly for the renewal of the rhythms of the church’s year. Here he varies between a tedious lament of the waning influence of Christianity on the lives of the general public—and their eating and drinking habits—and a forceful argument that reminds the reader of the distinction between chronos and kairos, an argument that the church would do well to remember.

The fourth essay engages the role of music in the liturgy, and makes a number of conservative assertions and arguments. While not wrong about why contemporary music so often fails to work well at creating or supporting certain moods important to solemn celebrations, the lament reads as cranky and overly conservative, rather than constructive.

In discussing the divine office in the fifth essay, “Town and Country,” Burnham is at his most effective. While I don’t agree with a number of his suggestions, nor his deep concern to restrict options, his argument that modern office forms need to balance and support both corporate and individual efforts to pray the office is compelling. (I have less sympathy for what he misses from the pre-conciliar breviary and the 1911 cursus, and more for a richer use of psalmody.)

I am still unsure what to make of the final essay on Mary. I agree whole-heartedly with his argument, following the Council of Ephesus of 431, that “there is no adequate Christology without an adequate Mariology” (196). Yet he reaches this point by tracing developments and expressions of the hyperdulia owed Mary, and I struggle with the assertion that “If lay folk paused at morning, noon, and night for the Angelus, if the Rosary became part of the daily rhythm of prayer, and if the Marian antiphon at the end of the day were to become once more a nocturnal habit, Christian daily life would again be Christocentric...” (196). The devotions to which he refers, while valuable and appropriate for some, are an expression of faith; they’re not essential. To quote another adage, all may, none must, and some should. I’m not sure they’re indicative of a Christocentric life, so much as merely a certain devotional strand; given Burnham’s concern in this sentence for laity, I’d be willing to agree if the rest of their lives manifested devotion for Christ translated into action and ministry. Despite this quibble, I learned some intriguing things both about Anglican devotion to Mary, and was able to make better sense of my own Mariology.

Despite my issues and disagreements with Burnham, I was glad to have read the book; I look forward to sharing it with a number of other people who might be intrigued by his points.

2010-07-29T21:59:00.003-04:00

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, 2009.

I don’t keep this reading journal as a way of crowing about what I have read; the blog doesn’t exist to trumpet notches on a bookshelf. Yet there are some entries, when I come to gather my thoughts on a book, that I can’t help but beginning by celebrating the fact that I finished reading it – even, and perhaps especially, when I really enjoyed the book, as in this case!

I first saw reference to MacCulloch’s magisterial monograph in Bishop David Hamid’s blog in October; Bishop Hamid reposts each month (with permission), the reviews compiled for the House of Bishops of the Church of England by that House’s Theological Secretary, Dr Martin Davie. I’ve been very tempted by more than one of the reviews, and a couple of the books have found their ways onto my shelves. Church history is in some ways one of my weaker subjects. Of all of my courses in the subject at seminary, only one wasn’t cross-listed to the Theology department and that was only because it was a reading course. My background, then, is more in the history of ideas, with the various other aspects of history sweeping in only as they affected theological developments. Reading MacCulloch, I was surprised both by how much I already knew and how much I did not. It’s a staggering, 1016 page, work that begins in the period well before the Church in both of the prominent cultures which would influence its early development (Greek and Hebrew) and extends through to the present day. Despite its length, the book’s vast scope means that the pace through the material is breakneck. MacCulloch’s prose is lucid and concise, and deeply funny with a simultaneously scathing and affectionate dry wit offering asides (I’m still laughing at bits about Moravians and a fascination with trombones, and the treatment of Henry VIII’s marital miscellany, but the humour is omnipresent; make sure to read the footnotes and the lists of major sources for each period, where even funnier bits lurk).

To attempt to offer a summary of the book would be audacious, given that it is in many ways itself a compendium. One observation I would make is that MacCulloch is interested not just in Christianity as we tend to think of it – that is, as a monolithic faith, albeit splintered into sects – but as it has been in varied forms and in possibilities. Much of what was new to me was about aspects of Christianity under- or mis-represented in most treatments, especially around non-Chalcedonian offshoots and local inculturations. The discussion of the Arian church in Europe was particularly fascinating.

MacCulloch has a gift for making the material deeply engaging, and introducing the reader to the major sources and gists of the various periods and types of Christianities that he elucidates. Many chunks of the book might seem deeply uncomfortable to anyone who comes to it with faith convictions that do not allow for serious consideration of other convictions. I think, as a whole, it’s a book that rewards the reader who already has at least a fairly familiar grasp on the history of the faith: the pacing is such that some topics receive short shrift, and background knowledge can help one fill in gaps. At the same time, as Dr. Davie noted in his review, much the fun of the book is deciding whether one agrees with the view MacCulloch propounds – or, perhaps, how one would nuance it. The thought I had throughout was that, if one needed to assess someone’s knowledge of Church History, asking them to compile a list of what they’d want to emend from the book in their own re-telling of the stories would be a very good assignment indeed.

I am glad that I spent the time with this work that I have; it has been a long read, and it has rewarded me richly. I have to agree with MacCulloch’s concluding words, about my reading experience as well as about the future of the faith he studies:

Original sin is one of the more plausible concepts within the Western Christian package, corresponding all too accurately to everyday human experience. One great encouragement to sin is an absence of wonder. Even those who see the Christian story as just that – a series of stories – may find sanity in the experience of wonder: the ability to listen and contemplate. It would be very surprising if this religion, so youthful, yet so varied in its historical experience, had now revealed all its secrets. (1016)

2010-07-26T21:35:00.003-04:00

Rachel Hawkins, Hex Hall, 2010.

I read this YA fantasy novel on the advice of K--, who’s mentioned some books from time to time that I’ve enjoyed. This one is unremarkable: it’s full of time-worn tropes, and feels somewhat like a True Blood crossed with Twilight crossed with the standard boarding school bildungsroman.

Sophie Mercer, a young witch, casts a spell that goes awry and is sent to Hecate Hall (Hex Hall for short), a boarding reform school for misbehaving witches, warlocks, weres, shifters, and fairies, and one vampire—who happens to be Sophie’s new roomie. Cue the stern but caring headmistress, the obligatory not-dead-after-all Romantic poet, the hot groundskeeper, the extra hot boy who’s involved with the new archnemesis who in turn is doing everything she can to make Sophie’s life impossible. Add in the complexities of a family history that’s anything but ordinary, and you’ve got yourself a novel. No stirring necessary. Now, that’s not to say this book isn’t decently written: I think it’s quite well plotted (if, perhaps a little too obvious in the foreshadowing and telegraphing what is to come). My lack of fulsome praise comes more from the pedestrian characters (even if three of them do ride brooms on occasion) and the insufficiently creative environs. I will use the cliché “two-dimensional” as the characters don’t rise to needing better description from me; for two examples about the milieu, I’ll point to the contrast the main character draws between the groundskeeper and Hagrid, as well as Sophie’s detention exercise (cataloguing magical objects which wander about from shelf to shelf).

For all these criticisms, it’s far more entertaining than the sexist and abysmally written Twilight pabulum. It's better plotted than the Potter novels, and yet not nearly as rich in the world the author spins into being.

All in all, Hex Hall made me long for decently done YA fantasy.

sic transit Gloria mundi, et ubi sunt…

Robin Mickinley (See especially The Blue Sword)

Pamela Service (The Reluctant God)

John Bellairs (Anything you open will reward your time.)

Rosemary Sutcliff(Start with Sword at Sunset)

2010-07-09T22:02:00.002-04:00

Philip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, 2010.

Pullman’s book is a fascinating retelling of the gospels. He uses a twist so widely-reported (and so nearly explicit in the title) that I’ll not attempt circumlocutions here as I try to blog about this book: Mary had twins, Jesus and Christ. Pullman tells the story with the former as a devout and wise teacher, frustrated by his inability to hear God’s voice; and with the latter as a manipulative editor who fakes the post-resurrection appearances to reveal what he hopes an institutional Church will be able to use as it grows and leads. The story is well-told and compelling, even as it will leave most readers who have a commitment to the Jesus of the gospels discomfited to varying degrees. I want to note in this blog entry two facets of the book which I find particularly interesting: the style of the telling, and the argument Pullman makes about God in general, Jesus in particular, and the Church which he feels should be damned.

Pullman tells his story in short sentences as part of many short chapters. Stylistically, it reminded me of nothing so much as the gospel of Mark. There’s a distinct lack of the kind of descriptions present in most novels. As just one example, Joseph proclaims himself an old man when told to marry Mary–but we have no description of him, nor of the kind of flower that issues from his rod as a sign when Zacharias is trying to decide who should become Mary’s husband. There are also marked gaps in the story-telling: as Pullman relates the Annunciation, Mary allows an angel who “had assumed the appearance of a young man” in through her window. After his explanation that God wants Mary to have a child, there’s a glaring omission as the next paragraph simply relates that “And that very night she conceived a child, just as the angel foretold.” Implicit or at least strongly possible is the idea of a physical role for the angel; yet I find interesting what Pullman is willing to hint at when later in the story he explicitly changes famous sayings and stories about Jesus—or has a character change them. Is this early non-change-but-hint an attempt to keep the religious reader unoffended for a bit longer? Is the desire not to drastically alter key moments with vivid associations? Or is it to keep some element of mystery present about the possibility of God acting? While the book’s sentences are crisp and active, impelling the story along with enough speed that the book may be easily read at a single sitting (again, like the Gospel of Mark), some of the alterations to the canonical stories are made more or less obvious by the adopted style that’s more like that of a gospel than that of The Golden Compass.

I need to be perfectly clear when I speak about the argument Pullman advances in the book about God, Jesus, and Church. I am a priest, and my signed a solemn declaration at both my ordinations “that I do believe the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation.” I don’t mention that statement to excuse my issues with Pullman, or to explain them away, but to make clear that I come to an interesting book which I did enjoy with biases that show forth in what I am about to write.

I think that what I read in this book may justifiably be called an argument that Pullman advances in the book precisely because it is so continuous with what the reader encounters in the His Dark Materials cycle, and in Pullman’s varied public statements and interviews. And yet I find it less persuasive here because it seems too convenient, too easy: anything Pullman wants to explain away can be the editing or revising work of the scoundrel Christ rather than the good man Jesus. Moreover, a substantial chunk of what Pullman argues is fallacious even if continuous with widespread understanding. Enough generalities; some particulars. The character of Christ invents a dove and a voice saying “This is my beloved son” at Jesus’ baptism (compare Mt 3.13-17; Mk 1.9-11; Lk 3.21-22; Jn 1.29-34—I’m not going to give passages from all four for the rest of these examples, but just the one which I think Pullman is drawing from most heavily); Christ is the devil who tempts Jesus after his forty days in the wilderness—and, notably, changes the final temptation about temporal power to speak of a Church much like that of history as a means of control/help (Mt 4.1—11); Christ records the sharing of food as a miracle, the feeding of multitudes (John 6.1-5); Christ invents Peter’s assertion that Jesus is the Messiah, and that Peter has the keys of heaven (Mt 16.13-20); Christ invents the distinction between Mary and Martha’s roles (Lk 10.38-42); Christ plays the role of Judas from the gospels (Lk 22.47-53); and on, and on, and on, through the post-resurrection appearances (esp. Lk 24.1-12 and 24.13-35). This device of twins is a way of explaining away the miraculous, of keeping the anti-establishment teacher of Jesus as an honest man with no interest in Church—and clearly not as someone who would rise from the dead. As scribe and as actor, the character of Christ is a redactor who brings Church and faith in Jesus into being—and hence is the scoundrel of the title. It’s a device that explains away differences between the four gospels found in the New Testament, and which attempts to explain away an idea of a truth that is revealed rather than invented. In short, my problem with the argument is literary: it’s just too easy a solution, one that allows Pullman to craft a Jesus as an earthly teacher who’s politically naïve but essentially admirable who is then used by malevolent and/or self-interested others to their own ends of control. Pullman’s Jesus is a tool of hegemony, and it’s a much weaker story as he tells it than as I read in (especially) the canonical gospels and in other retellings.

My other issue is theological rather than literary. Pullman’s idea of prayer is speech; his idea of prayer answered is God’s voice speaking clearly to an individual. This vision of prayer is made explicit in his retelling of Jesus praying in the garden before the crucifixion. It’s a popular notion and shared widely—but it misses the essential point that prayer is the offering of self to God and opening of self to grace. It’s especially odd to me that he works from this mode as he quotes psalms: to have been immersed in the psalms and not have some sense of what prayer is smacks either of inattention or simple pushing of agenda. And so the whole overwrought chapter is a continuation of the argument I describe in the paragraph of above, of Jesus not wanting church to become and existing as hegemonic tool. I felt more discomfort after this chapter than after any other, for while the church on earth through history has certainly been that at times, Pullman is ignoring the idea that the Church may exist more broadly than that as well—and that it may well also be ideal that we strive for, as well as constantly falling short in its erring human existence.

Two long paragraphs of discontent might suggest that I disliked the book, despite my earlier assertion. I did enjoy it; I was challenged by it; I’m glad I read it. I’d certainly recommend it to others. If nothing else, it will ask the reader to return to Pullman’s sources and engage the Jesus one meets in those four remarkable sets of stories –each one of which is just as ideological and bound on conversion to a set of conclusions as is Pullman’s new book. Rowan Williams suggests a theme that he reads in the book that “the price you pay for transmitting a spiritual vision” can be very high in institutional terms, and that Christianity has paid too high a price. (On Start the Week, 5 April 2010)—and that he disagrees. I do too, but Pullman’s book is compelling nevertheless.

2010-07-01T11:42:00.002-04:00

Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl, 2001.

I’m late to the party, on this one. I saw a reference to this book on a blog I read, and months later, grabbed it from the library. I'm glad I've shown up.

Artemis Fowl II, 12, is a criminal mastermind with a missing father, a mother who’s missing her mental health, and a valet who is remarkably good at all sorts of combat. The Fowl family, long felonious, has had an economic downturn, and Artemis plans to reverse that by stealing fairy gold. Kidnapping a LEPRecon officer—the first female officer, Captain Holly Short—he holds her for ransom and works to fend off the LEPRecon squads under the command of the foul-cigar smoking Commander Julius Root. Mayhem and hilarity and death ensue. It’s a well-done fantasy novel for youth that is both more intelligent and lacks the pretension of the Potter novels.

The puns are fun; the adventure is fun; the clever re-imagining of the fairy world is fun: the book is just plain fun. Enough so that I’ll read at least the next in the series (Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident). It was exactly the right sort of enjoyment in the midst of a couple of other long books.

2010-07-01T00:04:00.003-04:00

Tom Sharpe, The Gropes,* 2009.

I loved Blott on the Landscape as a lad: it's funny, sharp, biting in just the right ways, and does a marvellous job of skewering people's self-importance. So given the opportunity to read another by Sharpe--my father bought it as a plane book, and then left it lying around--I picked it up. It's a palate-cleanser, but nothing more. The plot of The Gropes is well enough done: an odd, matriarchal family combined with a gormless bank manager, his doppelgänger son, and romance novel-obsessed wife combined with her brother who might be a minor or even major criminal leads to silliness and suspicion. It falls a bit flat at the end, although I suspect most readers will find themselves almost happy for the bank manager--but all in all, there's nothing in this book to make me want to recommend it to anyone. If you happen to be renting a cottage and it's lying around and you forget your newly acquired copy of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet at home, sure, give it a read. Otherwise, buy and read Mitchell's new book instead.

* Why no link? Well, Amazon was about my only option. While I do buy books from Amazon on occasion, I try to avoid it. So--if you want to acquire this book (or any other!) check out your local bookstore. In the Hamilton area, I strongly recommend Bryan Prince Bookseller, where I picked up The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet yesterday...

2010-06-28T19:42:00.003-04:00

Scarlett Thomas,
     Dead Clever, 1998.
     In Your Face, 1999.
     Seaside, 1999.

Thomas’s first three books are murder mysteries, with the mostly delightful Lily Pascale as their detective-protagonist.

At the beginning of Dead Clever, Lily, who is not making it as an actress, returns to her mother’s house in Devon—-and finds herself hired as a tutor by the local university. It seems she has an MA in literature, having written about crime fiction, and from this background comes her sneaking suspicion that the skills of a literary critic are the skills of a detective. There's a reason to find her suspicion plausible, as a recently dead and mysteriously beheaded university student had been a student in one of Lily's classes. Other disturbing phenomena occur, and Lily finds herself investigating away. The reader learns a fair bit about organic chemicals of the Ecstasy and similar substances, as well as anti-depressants and so on as Lily sleuths her way through a very different sort of university than the kind at which I studied.

In Your Face sees Lily in London, after an old university chum phones her up after the three subjects of her recent magazine piece on stalking turn up murdered on the same morning. Naturally, there are complications—-romantic, and otherwise.

In Seaside, Lily is hired to figure out which one of a pair of twins is dead—and who killed her. Another couple of deaths and some wacky characters and hijinks follow along.

All in all, they’re decent mysteries. Thomas has a predilection for inserting, in between segments of the narratives of Lily’s investigations, italicised thoughts, plans, and conversations of the guilty parties. The technique lacks the balance it needs: mysteries shouldn’t be solved with deus ex machina revelations, and this technique helps to avoid that—-but the method is uneven in terms of what is and isn’t revealed; we teeter too much over the precipice on both sides of too much and too little shared, and the books feel unstable because of it.

Lily is smart, thinks critically (most of the time), and funny; it’s easy to enjoy her progression through the stories. My problem with the characterisations in the novels has more to do with the minor characters—often introduced, dropped, brought back, ignored without sufficient care. Beth, the girlfriend of Lily’s younger brother is a prime example: other than as an almost-victim, she pops up solely when convenient to advance the plot, and isn’t well integrated into the books as a whole.

The first two of the three are quite worth reading; I’m far less fond of the final entry in the trilogy, which veers from the clever into the trite and formulaic.

2010-06-22T22:20:00.001-04:00

Scarlett Thomas, PopCo, 2004.

I have an odd fascination with Thomas’ writing despite its flaws. There’s something deeply attractive that I can’t identify or explain about her writing—and whatever it draws me back to read yet another of her novels—and yet, there are issues that make me frustrated with it at the same time. PopCo is much like her more recent The End of Mr. Y.

PopCo is the fictionalised retelling of Naomi Klein’s No Logo. Alice Butler, who works for the toy company which gives the book its name, attends a product development camp in Devon—and is seconded to a group charged with developing the new viral product for teen girls. In the pseudo-boarding school environment of the camp, there’s sex, suspicion, cliques, games of Go, and interesting food recipes (one for a tasty sounding cake called “Let them eat cake”). This tale is interwoven with that of Alice’s childhood: she was raised by her grandparents (a mathematician and a puzzler) after her father ran off to try to solve a coded treasure map his father-in-law had deciphered. The former set of stories lacks sparkle and teaches too much about advertising and marketing; the second set tries to balance narrative and exposition about code-breaking, without entirely succeeding.

Despite the entirely predictable ending to both sets of stories, there is something deeply endearing about this book. I was captivated by both the stories and what Thomas is trying to teach. And who can dislike a book with a frequency table for how often letters occur in written English? It’s worth reading, especially if you’re a Naomi Klein fan or like your harlequin-esque sex mixed with some decent thinking.

2009-03-09T23:24:00.003-04:00

John Green, Paper Towns, 2008.

I stayed up too late a week ago to finish the book; it makes sense that I’d stay up too late tonight, writing a blog entry about it.

It’s much like Green’s other books, in terms of its energy, pacing, and careful reimagining of the bildungsroman. The main character, Quentin, is caught up one night in helping Margo-- the next-door neighbour whom he adores—with pranks and revenge… only to be dismayed by her disappearance the next morning. As high school draws to a close, he follows a trail of clues to find her--and dragging along with him the usual odd assortment of supporting characters (who struggle with their own -issues and who challenge Quentin to do some substantive work to grow up).

The conceit of the book—the concept of a paper town itself—is clever and intriguing, and doesn’t overtake the plot. In some ways, the book is stronger than Green’s other efforts: the plotting is tighter and less contrived, exposition is handled more neatly, and the characters are more plausible as people (I’d argue some in both Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines are better as ideas than as characters).

It’s a fun and funny book, deeply enjoyable, and reveals (as does his earlier work) a truth about Green: he’s a good teacher. He’s the sort of engaging, clever, funny, sweet guy who cares deeply about topics and wants to share them. What impresses me most about Paper Towns is that Green is getting better and better at integrating that truth about himself with his deep desire to tell stories that people want to read (and blog about) late into the night.

2009-01-04T14:10:00.000-05:00

Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The First Christmas, 2007.

Borg and Crossan’s book is a careful look at the birth and infancy narratives in Matthew’s gospel and in Luke’s gospel. They do an exemplary job of looking at the particular concerns of the two communities—comparing and contrasting the differences between the two stories. The close reading is not particularly remarkable—it is eminently “doable” by people who have experience, but it’s done remarkably well. What is innovative is the argument the authors advance that the birth and infancy narratives offer the “gospel in miniature”: that these sections present the overall themes and concerns of Matthew and Luke, and that the content of the remainder of the gospels is contained in the almost-prologue-esque nature of the Christmas stories.

In some ways, it’s the last chapter which is most effective. Borg and Crossan tie together three themes that they look at throughout the book—joy, Advent, and “the meaning of Christmas past for Christmas present and Christmas future” (227). It’s an effective piece, and one I may well find myself rereading at the beginning of November next year as I get ready to preach in Advent and Christmas.

2009-01-03T12:43:00.001-05:00

Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success, 2008.

I loved The Tipping Point. I think it’s a brilliant book, and I learned a lot from it. I’m a little astonished I didn’t blog about it at the time! It was likely because I was in the middle of thesis-ing.

Outliers is told in a very similar way: anecdotes and carefully presented data make sense of truths that are hard to see through the clouds. Gladwell’s lucid prose and brilliant storytelling make it an enjoyable read. My only problem with the book is that there’s nothing to it. Oh, sure, Gladwell convincingly proves his thesis that the success of people are not due to sheer dint of hard work (the old self-made man story crap), but rather that that they’re products of environment, milieu, history, genetics, and deep cultural traditions. He convinced me that it's better to see these successes more as outliers from the statistical mass, than it is is to see them within the usual narratives.

But… so? Yes, it’s a myth that needed to be punctured, but it’s hardly a shock. Gladwell offers no tools to assess situations and histories to determine patterns to make one’s self a success, nor does he offer tools to create effective communities like that of Roseto, PA (a very healthy town that he uses to begin his book). To return to the language of the book's title, there's no attempt to ask major questions about how we can shift the mean toward significant measures of wellness. The trends he thinks about are visible in his rear-view mirror, but never through the windscreen.

Ultimately, I was left disappointed. Gladwell’s book is brilliant at giving the answers to the “what” questions, but never gets to the “so what” questions in any adequate ways.

2009-01-02T13:37:00.001-05:00

David Gilmour, The Film Club, 2007.

Gilmour’s memoir spans just a short period of time, from when he realises that school is killing his son until the end of their unusual experiment. His son Jesse—a bright, capable, and quite pleasant teenager when the story begins—is unmotivated and uninterested in school. David can sense that forcing Jesse to stay in school will lead only to badness. So father makes son a deal: Jesse can drop out, if we watches three movies a week with his dad.

It’s a fascinating premise. It just failed to hold my interest for the duration of the book. I enjoyed Gilmour recounting how he introduced each movie, how he designed groups of movies, what to watch for in each flick. The story of Jesse’s growth and development is more interesting and enjoyable still. Yet as I read it, I never felt the book come together: it lacked sufficient coherence, and felt as if it was held together only by straight chronology. I enjoyed reading it, and had no problem moving through it… but I just never found myself engrossed.

2009-01-01T18:28:00.002-05:00

Christopher Moore, Coyote Blue, 1994.

I found myself needing something that was simultaneously funny, light and profound. This desire, odd and paradoxical, is a hard one to fulfil--except, of course, until you start reading Christopher Moore’s books. (If you’ve never read Lamb, you should go find a copy now: it is beyond incredibly brilliant.)

Coyote Blue is a romp through native American mythology, a playing-story with Coyote that’s delightful and very funny. It’s not as nuanced, as slyly playful as are Tom King’s novels (especially Green Grass, Running Water) but its sheer exuberance is undeniable. (For a brilliant academic treatment of the Trickster, read one of my favourite books: Trickster Makes the World by Lewis Hyde.)

The story revolves around Samson Hunts Alone, who is forced to leave his reservation when still a young man. After a series of jobs, he’s secured for himself a seemingly great existence as an insurance salesman. Yet the intervention of Coyote brings both love and chaos into his orderly, predictable existence… and things go crazy from there.

It was exactly the sort of book I was looking for: it is the right mix of crazy, zany, and at the same time deeply thoughtful about what it means to live well.

2008-12-27T13:01:00.002-05:00

Charlaine Harris, Dead Until Dark, 2001.

A pleasant, ephemeral, un-mysterious mystery that was oh so much better than the two Twilight novels I read (and about which, because of their sheer disturbing trashiness, misogyny, and general annoying-ness, I refuse to blog). Dead Until Dark is the first story about Sookie Stackhouse--and the basis for a new HBO series, called True Blood. It`s light and fluffy, and replete with vampires and other otherwordly creatures. Don`t expect much, but enjoy the pleasant pulp that relaxes your brain, right after a Christmas that was very, very full of services.

2008-12-01T12:00:00.002-05:00

John Green, An Abundance of Katherines, 2006.

My second John Green read, An Abundance of Katherines is a delightful romp. Immediately post break-up, Colin Singleton heads out on a road trip with his best friend, the very funny Hassan. Stopping in the amusingly named Gutshot, TN, the two luck into jobs and housing. Hassan immediately begins to make friends and fit in, while Colin mopes about his most recent girlfriend. Colin--a child prodigy who deeply wants to do something that matters--sets out to develop a formula which will predict which of two people in a relationship will be the dumper, and which the dumpee. He has a fair bit of data to make sense of, having had nineteen relationships with women all named Katherine.

Colin also has a lot of useless information at his fingertips, which may perhaps be why I identified with the lad. I experienced as much joy reading the footnotes--which play with or explain some of the details Colin shares--as I did reading the story! He's also a brilliant at anagrams, a skill in which I am profoundly lacking--to my detriment whenever I'm bored and there are only cryptics lying about.

At any rate, it's a funny, funny book and is touchingly sweet. My impression of Green as a solid and impressive YA author is soaring, and I should really introduce my mother to Green's work. I also need to get my hands on a copy of Paper Towns, to give it a read.

2008-11-29T11:54:00.003-05:00

John Green, Looking for Alaska, 2005.

So. Because I like Jonathan Coulton, I discovered Molly’s ukulele playing on YouTube (her screen name is sweetafton23). So I subscribed to Molly, and a little while ago, watched her video of playing a nerdfighter’s show at the Seattle Public Library. This video, in turn, allowed me to discover the charming John & Hank Green and their Brotherhood 2.0 project. (It also helped me to discover the marvellous song stylings of Ms. Julia Nunes, whose music is stuck in my head of late.) Having discovered John & Hank, I thought I’d give John’s writing a try.

I read Looking for Alaska first, which is a well wrought novel. It’s the story of a young man named Miles Halter, who goes off to boarding school seeking the “Great Perhaps” and who makes friends with other amiable eccentricities (Miles' own eccentricity is a remarkable knowledge of people’s last words). It’s very clearly a bildungsroman, with some of the shortcomings of that particular literary genre—specifically, a fair bit of exposition by a religious knowledge teacher at the school which introduces some concepts of Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam (perhaps hardly surprising given Green’s double major in English and Religion). While these expository bits drag a bit, it’s less notable than similar chunks in most bildungsromans that I’ve read. They’re well integrated with the plot, and do add to it, but they’re a big part of why I see this novel as more of a YA title than something more literary. The plot itself revolves around a tragedy at the school: the book’s two sections are entitled “Before” and “After.”

I’m glad I picked it up and read it. It’s clever, funny, and eminently enjoyable—and I can see why it appeals strongly, both to the nerdfighter community and beyond.

2008-10-21T13:36:00.001-04:00

A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, 2004.

The Know-It All is not as good as The Year of Living Biblically. There’s no bias in my reasoning, that I can identify: they’re both eminently enjoyable books, filled with musings about what it is to live. Jacobs’ more recent book, though, has a stronger narrative, a clearer through-line that gives shape to his experience in a way that the A-Z nature of this earlier book lacks.

I bought The Know-It All after L. gave me—and I so enjoyed--The Year of Living Biblically as a present. Jacobs spends a year reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica. More than anything -else, I was struck by how much I am occasionally like Jacobs: enjoying the sharing of obscure, only vaguely relevant bits of trivia and arcana. It can be compulsive.

While it was a meaningful experience for Jacobs, his summary of what he learned takes only a couple of paragraphs. Throughout, he shares interesting experiencing, tidbits of knowledge, and how he makes sense of the experience. Yet while having knowledge helps one in many ways (I’ve always wanted to know everything), I was bemused by the framing of the book, that of a quest to become smarter. It seems too trite, too simplistic a frame: this problem may well explain why I found The Year of Living Biblically to be that much more powerful a quest for meaning than The Know It-All.

It’s an enjoyable book, and worth a read. You’ll pick up all sorts of interesting and completely useless bits of knowledge: Nathaniel Hawthorne was obsessed with the number 64; women in Peru wear yellow underwear on New Year’s; that the name of eggplant “comes from the white egg-shaped variety” (which may explain to my sister why the Brits insist on calling the eggplant that we know an “aubergine”); that “Etruscans sometimes wrote boustrophedon style, in which the direction of writing alternates with each line—right-to-left, then left-to-right”; that Mormons were the first settlers in Las Vegas... I expect you’ll get a bit better at Trivial Pursuit, reading it—though better still if you repeat Jacobs’ experiment!

2008-10-14T23:35:00.003-04:00

Shalom Auslander, Foreskin’s Lament, 2007.

Reading this blog, you’d be forgiven this week if you think I pick what book to read next based on my compulsive listening to NPR’s This American Life. I first heard Auslander on an episode about the ten commandments. He described a period of his life when the rabbinical instructors at his Hebrew school yelled at him if he dared write his name on anything—from an atlas to a lunch bag: “Name of the Creator!” It’s a story both moving and sad; his voice, which sounds vaguely reminiscent of Eeyore, makes it impossible not to feel deep empathy for the mistreatment Shalom endured—and yet he tells the stories in a way that is funny, and wry. He happened to be on an episode of Tapestry the other weekend, so I placed a hold on his new book. I raced through it.

Foreskin’s Lament is a memoir about his relationship with God. He writes that his relationship with God “has been an endless cycle not of the celebrated ‘faith followed by doubt,’ but of appeasement followed by revolt; placation followed by indifference; please, please, please, followed by fuck it, fuck You, fuck off” (71). It was hearing that idea on Tapestry that made me want to read the book. Let me quote Auslander again, and try to explain what it is that I mean:

I do not keep Sabbath or pray three times a day or wait six hours between eating meat and milk. The people who raised me will say that I am not religious. They are mistaken. What I am not is observant. But I am painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious, and I have watched lately, dumb-founded and distraught, as around the world, more and more people seem to be finding Gods, each one more hateful and bloodthirsty than the next, as I’m doing my best to lose him. I’m failing miserably.
I believe in God.
It’s been a real problem for me. (71-72)

There are two things here which intrigue me. The first is that Auslander is not of the Sam Harris / Richard Dawkins school, suggesting that what’s wrong with the world is religion. He’s not convinced that religion won’t lead to the sort of abuse that he experienced, that Harris and Dawkins claim is normative and rail against. Rather, Auslander is quite clear: what’s wrong is how faith has been lived out. Maybe there’s a better way to live it, though likely not. So how do you survive with it? Secondly, there’s an intriguing notion, better described elsewhere when his wife Orli offers a felicitous description of an infelicitous upbringing: Auslander was theologically abused, by parents, teachers, and his societal group as a whole. Without suggesting any sort of equivalence, this latter idea made me wonder about people who have been brought up within a faith tradition and have fled it. Do they do so only because they perceive no relevancy, no connection? Or is there something else, some trauma or injustice, something which has driven them away? And in this latter case, what is the appropriate response of the faith community? Saying “It wasn’t us” or “That’s not who we are now” isn’t any more satisfying than saying “We’re sorry you went through that” to the injured. What is the justice making response, if any?

Reading Auslander, I’m left with more questions than answers. I don’t have a response to his writing that feels in any way adequate. I am genuinely sorry that he has such a tortured relationship with God, and that he had such an upbringing that has left him in this state. He’s very clear in his writing that what he experienced is not Judaism; and yet he’s far from sure that any faith--even one that turns again and again to the Shema--can escape such perversions. I was amused and engaged as I read his book; I felt drawn in, and present to his stories.

Ultimately, I’m left with something he said in the Tapestry interview. Tragedy, he argued, is the human response to the events of our lives: abject dejection, a sense that no good is entirely possible, that we’re too trapped by fate. Humour, in contrast, is God’s perspective: the way of looking back over events and seeing that there’s more than pain and suffering. It’s an interesting way of thinking about the two modes, and as Auslander plays with this idea, he privileges comedy in a way I’ve not encountered before.

It’s a book well worth a read; I hope it will leave you with more questions than answers, just as it left me.

2008-10-13T21:54:00.002-04:00

Dan Savage, The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family, 2005.

I first encountered Savage when I read, at the urging of a former co-worker, a couple of Savage’s advice columns: Savage Love. While far more entertaining than most such columns, I wasn’t hugely excited. Then I heard him on one of my addictions: the NPR show This American Life. Surely, if Ira Glass likes the guy’s writing... I was hooked. Even Savage’s voice works well, drawing you into his stories.

It was one of those stories which inspired me to get this book out from HPL. Savage was talking about his son’s opposition to Savage marrying his boyfriend Terry, and I found myself in tears by the end of that act of TAL (which you can listen to here). When I learnt that there was an entire book devoted to the musings, I placed a hold.

It is a book that is by turns touching, vitriolic, foul-mouthed, pensive, inquisitive; it is an incisive commentary on the state of the United States, with some travelogue-esque sections that made me remember de Tocqueville. At its heart, though, it’s a book about what family is and means. Savage’s own large family, whose various members have adopted diverse varieties of familial models, provides much fodder for Savage attempting to make sense of one question: should he and Terry get married? I didn’t cry again, reading it, but I found myself feeling a number of moments quite intensely. One such moment, well worth years of future consideration, is about our relationships in neighbourhoods: how they’re constructed, how we attempt to escape them, how we re-create them in later life. One large Catholic family, rooted in one area of a city for a number of generations offers a treasure trove for thinking about individuals, families, and communities.

So, it's a book I'm glad that TAL pointed me toward. I promise to let it pick my books for me even more frequently.

2008-08-10T13:37:00.003-04:00

Dustin Long, Icelander, 2006.

I acquired this novel from McSweeney’s as I renewed a subscription two years ago, and have been looking forward to reading it for some time. Its book jacket/slip describes it as a “Nabokovian goof on Agatha Christie; a madcap mystery in the deceptive tradition of The Crying of Lot 49; The Third Policeman meets The Da Vinci Code. …an intricate, giddy romp steeped equally in Nordic lore and pulpy intrigue.” I’m not sure I can offer anything more than that. What, indeed, can one say about a book that begins with a Dramatis Personae list which includes “Hubert Jorgen: Rogue library-scientist”?

It’s an odd book that has an unreliable narrator, an unreliable editor, and a host of wacky and intriguing characters, the rogue library-scientist included. Others include a pair of detectives that seem a cross of I Heart Huckabees and Thomson and Thompson from Tintin; a main character of a detective who doesn’t want to detect (quite unlike her famous mother); an under-developed-as-a-person avatar of a Norse God; a macguffin named MacGuffin who is only semi-macguffin-y; and a peculiar take on Iceland itself (which seems to have spread to the United States), and fortunately exists in a parallel universe.

As a book, it’s a delightfully silly romp (the detective plot is formulaic and unexceptional, but that’s actually by design) that will have you counting allusions to everything from, well, Tintin to As I Lay Dying, to… well, many, many more places. The allusions are both well done and silly, and made me laugh out loud on more than one occasion. It seems like a McSweeney’s book: it asks for well-read readers, and won’t disappoint them with the particular style associated with Eggers and his cohort. It was a lovely light read to use to emerge from my retreat, before I dive into something with more heft.

2008-08-07T15:55:00.000-04:00

… continuing our travels with M. Proust…

I finished the “Place-Names • The Name” section: that accomplishment means I have now finished the first volume of the novel. Swann’s Way, which has long sat beside my bed at home, can be placed back on its bookshelf. I am not in a huge rush to draw the next volume from the shelf; I think I may pause. Yet I did greatly enjoy this final section: the contrast between M. Swann’s love affair in the previous section and the first blushes of love in the narrator show both the similarities of every new infatuation and the differences of habit in those of different ages. There’s a deep sweetness to this section, almost a gentle self-deprecation while not minimizing the profundity of the experience of the narrator’s love for Gilberte. The intriguing question for me, as I continue in the novel, revolves around the disparity of affection toward M. Swann from the narrator’s parents when at Combray and when in Paris: I do wonder if I’ll learn yet more about their relationship as I move into further volumes. First, though, I will need a variety of divertissements before reading more if In Search of Lost Time. I’ll end this entry by quoting the end of the volume, a lovely musing on memory and place:

“The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin, slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.” (606)

2008-08-06T23:23:00.000-04:00

jon mcgregor, if nobody speaks of remarkable things, 2002.

W— and S— gave me this book as an ordination present. I opened it, with W— sitting in my office with me, and he told me that they wanted to give me something that they didn’t think I’d have read, and something that might speak to my ordination and my new urban context for ministry. He told me that it revolved around an event, and spoke of a series of individuals’ reactions to that event, how they had been irrevocably scarred by their experience of it. I was intrigued. I started to read the book a night or two later, and was awed by the first few pages: they’re remarkable. I knew I needed some uninterrupted time to read this book, and so I brought it with me on retreat.

The first pages are lyrical: they describe the song of a city, and how it pauses for only the briefest of moments. It’s a beautiful prose poem, and reading it I couldn’t help but think of Wordsworth’s “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge”: it’s that descriptive, that evocative.

From there, the scars are evident almost immediately. What’s astonishing is how the cast of characters remain almost entirely nameless: we meet and remember them by description, by the sort of characteristics we would notice if we encountered them in our neighbourhood but never said more than a polite “hello”—and it’s entirely intentional, a sharply pointed comment about our intertwined lives but about how we maintain such incredible gulfs of separation with our very neighbours. What astonishes me is that the writing makes it work, that the writing is capable of sustaining the effort across the 275 pages of the novel: names, despite the assertion in T.S. Eliot’s feline poetry, do not always convey our deepest beings, our longings and sorrows and our delights and our joys. One of the effects is that each segment, each brief piece about some of the very real people feels anecdotal—just a story about someone I happened to know. They are anecdotes made universal by their lack of identification yet at the same time deeply real and particular in the crisply rendered details that mcgregor feeds us as we read.

The prose does not remain as stunning throughout as in the first few magnificent pages, but it’s never expository, never dull: it remains elusive, revealing bit by bit in a skilfully crafted story. There are some passages, though, which live up to the promise of those first pages. While it is my habit to quote from books in entries in this blog, I’m not going to, with this book: the passages are sharper and stronger in context, and while not less powerful as excerpts, they convey more still in situ. The passage that gives the book its title is one such; for it alone, this book is worth reading. The images—oh, the bungee jumping!—are a delight, and mcgregor handles them so deftly that I’d be interested indeed to know if he writes poetry, as well. As the plot moves slowly along, as we watch relationships develop we move inexorably closer to learning the events of the tragic day: after such a prolonged build-up, it was a relief that, though entirely prosaic, they did not disappoint and were indeed so strong as to move me to tears.

Thank you, W— and S— for this lovely and wonderful gift which I now look forward to re-reading and to sharing with others. You certainly succeeded in all your objectives with this present! For those who read this blog and take it seriously, I’d like to give you a strong recommendation: go and buy this book, and devour it. You’ll thank W— and S—, too.

2008-08-05T06:39:00.002-04:00

L. William Countryman, Living on the Border of the Holy: Renewing the Priesthood of All, 1999.

As my ordination was looming nearer, and I was chatting with my friend M—- about my desire to make better sense of ordination as a sacrament, he strongly recommended Countryman’s book. I began to read it before my pre-ordination retreat, but hardly had much time to spend with it, before or since. It’s hardly surprising, then, that it was the focus of my retreat this past week.

Countryman’s book is genius, absolute and stunning genius. It’s dense and far from an easy read, but is profoundly rewarding. He begins by defining “priest” as “any person who lives in the dangerous, exhilarating, life-giving borderlands of human existence, where the everyday experience of life opens up to reveal glimpses of the HOLY—-and not only lives there, but comes to the aid of others who are living there” (xi). To gloss this idea slightly, allow me to recast it: a priest is someone who has been aware in some way of the presence of the ONE WHO IS and then makes an effort to help others into their own experiences of the TRANSCENDENT. (The small-cap thing, which I'm not learning how to do in html, is Countryman’s stylistic habit, and makes a certain amount of sense in context: you, reading only this blog entry, must simply live with me using it in this entry.) What is fascinating about this definition is the unavoidable conclusion that we are, simply by being human, priests at some moments in our lives. Those with a priestly identity are those more attuned to living in the “borderland” in which we can encounter GOD, and who make a conscious effort to help others attune their own livings of life to be attentive to the presence of the HIDDEN REALITY. The other conclusion we can draw is that religion, in its variety of forms, is a stylized effort to try to mediate and re-present the ULTIMATE to those who participate in the rites and faiths tied to the practice of religion. Ordained priests at their best and most honest then are a sacramental representation of our inherent human priesthood. OK: simpler still, priesthood is about seeking and sharing the experience of TRUTH in our lives, and about remembering that this is the important focal point for how we live out our own lives.

The book is brilliant. The footnotes are engaging, and have provided for me a number of interesting things to read (though I recommend reading the book once, ignoring the footnotes, and then reading it again with the footnotes, so as not to bog down in the asides and interesting ideas: not sources so much as other thoughts with which Countryman is in conversation). I would recommend it highly to those interested in thinking about vocation, about how we encounter and share our encounters of the HOLY, and about the meaning of vocation itself. I will leave you with a sample of quotations from the book which may pique your interest further.

“I cannot say too often that the priesthood of the whole people is the fundamental priesthood. Even for the ordained minister, Christian priesthood still means primarily one’s exercise of the priesthood shared with the whole people. The ordained priesthood is a sacramental service offered not so much to the whole people (which would imply a stance over and against the laity) as in and for that prior and more universal ministry.” (109)

“The great tool of priesthood is not any specific knowledge—whether of the Bible or history or theology or newer disciplines such as pastoral counselling or church growth. Any or all of these are of potential value, but the great tool of priesthood is a priestly life, a priestly self. And such a self, as we have been saying, grows and matures by the fact of our living, attentively and in communion with other priests, on the border of the HOLY. It occurs in conversation with GOD and with one another.” (152)

“The Bible, church history, the traditions of intellectual theology, the ethical reflections of past and present, the liturgical tradition—all these interact with one another and, above all, with our lived experience of GRACE, to create the present and future of our faith.” (155)

“Jesus’ living out of the fundamental human priesthood serves to focus and guide our living out of it in our own time and place. But it will never be enough if we try merely to copy what Jesus did. Instead, we pray that what we learn from Jesus will shape us so that we can live responsibly and generously, in our own day and place, as Jesus did in his.” (77)

2008-08-04T15:33:00.004-04:00

The past week has been wonderful for reading. I read the entirety of if nobody speaks of remarkable things, a wonderful present from W—and S--, and a book which left me in awe both of the skill of the artist and the world in which we live. I finally finished Swann’s Way. I finished, and then read again, L. William Countryman’s book, Living on the Border of the Holy: Renewing the Priesthood of All, which is about priesthood (both the ordained kind and the more important kind that stems from our humanity) and what it is to live in ways open to the HOLY. I read quite a number of poems by Rowan Williams. I spent a lot of time with the book of Kings. I enjoyed and learnt from Barbara Brown Taylor’s The Preaching Life. I read Edmund Gosse’s biography of Jeremy Taylor, and a large and not overly fruitful chunk of Jeremy Taylor’s own work, including the entirety of Holy Dying, in the fond hope of finding a passage that has been occupying my spiritual life for some time now. I browsed throughout the monastery’s library, and read bits and pieces of a number of different things, about which I will not make an effort to blog. I’ve reread The Rule of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, and chunks of de Waal’s expansive commentary on the rule of Benedict, A Life-Giving Way. I’ve started reading Icelander, an amusing and odd mystery novel (“A Nabokovian goof on Agatha Christie,” reads the back), if only because its name sounds soothing in the midst of the heat of summer (though chapel, library, and refectory have been deliciously cool).

I have also read a lot of psalms. Some I sang, some I spoke, and many more I listened to. In one of the books I glanced into there was a story of a Zen master visiting a Camaldolese monastery and commenting on the amount of time the monks spent reading the psalms. The response given to the Zen master by one of the monks was no: we spend far more time listening to our brothers read them to us. We are quiet here, and we listen. This retreat of mine has been about space and about calm, about an entirely different rhythm of life than that which I experience at home. It will be interesting for me to pay attention to how I carry the rhythms of this place back with me. To a large extent, that’s why I brought my copy of the SSJE rule with me, and the de Waal commentary: I want to be more intentional about how I am, and they’ve offered me some help in making sense of how to re-engage the process of reflection on my life. More helpful still was the endless flow of psalms, the wave of scripture read, and the wash of “chapters” that share stories of the saints and our call to respond to God’s love that have enveloped me and made space for me to be quiet.

I have been still.

I have enjoyed the rich waft of cedar that has held me in a close embrace in the chapel.

On my way to and from that space of prayer (and particularly on my way to and from Matins, at 4:00am) I have revelled in the odd smell that reminds me of the strawberry fruit roll-ups that were a staple in my grade school lunch boxes. It took me five or six trips along the path before I was able to identify the smell, and it evoked waves of nostalgia, and makes a fitting image of this time and my reading: a Proustian recollection; an invitation, a la Countryman and Brown Taylor, to look deeper into all things of the world, that we may experience and share our encounter with the ONE WHO IS, a reminder of the transitory nature of life from Williams’ poetry, and a true Benedictine way of being quiet, and listening. Away, I’ve had much needed time for reading and prayer. I’m looking forward to discovering how to carry this experience back with me into the rest of my life: I will be still, in the midst of busy-ness.

2008-06-15T17:35:00.001-04:00

A.J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, 2007.

Lesley gave me this book as an ordination present; given the new job, I’m astonished I finished it within a month.

The premise is entirely contained in the book’s title. Jacobs writes in such an engaging manner that the steady stream of vignettes and reflections are riveting, regardless of whether each one is silly or serious. It’s not an academic work of theology, and no student of Biblical interpretation is going to be wildly excited by how Jacobs works through the questions that arise as he tries to ascertain just HOW to follow the Bible as literally as possible. At the same time, the vignettes can function as great conversation starters, allowing those questions to be raised for others. (I know of one rector in the diocese who has used the book successfully for a book study, though she found it more effective with selections of quotations, rather than the entire book.) Jacobs asks good, jargon-free questions about conflicting ways to take the Bible literally, and ultimately is far more concerned with how to read it seriously—his sympathies are far more with people like Marcus Borg than with the innumerable fundamentalists he encounters. What impressed me is that he maintains an unflinching sympathy and equitable portrayal of those with whom he disagrees, though he is clear and forthright about his own reactions.

There are a number of poignant moments in the book, and though I found myself having to concentrate harder in the last third of the year it describes, I was glad to read it. I enjoyed it sufficiently that I’m looking forward to reading his earlier memoir about reading through the Encyclopedia Brittanica (The Know-It-All).

2008-04-15T12:24:00.000-04:00

Stan Persky, Topic Sentence: A Writer’s Education, 2007.

I started reading this one based on the Globe’s review of it (I should really start recording when I add things to my to-read list; I think I acquired the book shortly after it came out, and have only just finished it). It’s been bed-time reading—most of its sections are sufficiently short that I culd read one or two before going to sleep—and with my earlier bedtimes of late, I’ve been doing more of such reading.

Topic Sentence is an intriguing collection. Almost every piece therein is at least partially a memoir. Organized into “Before,” “During,” and “After,” the collected thoughts examine what it is to write well—poetry, memoir, and essays. They describe relationships with some of the most prominent poets of the twentieth century. One of my particular favourites, “The Horses of Instruction” is one of the best pieces of writing about education and philosophy that I’ve encountered. The pieces in the “During” section revolve primarily around Persky’s sexuality—both his life experience, and his making sense of society and culture—and comprise some moving and insightful writing. The epilogue to “Eros and Cupid” is genius.

As you read this collection, your own sense of writing is likely to shift: whether it’s a renewed appreciation for words in “The Translators” or the attempt to survey aspects of what it is to read the times one lives through—and especially the work of Orwell, Isherwood, Miłosz, Creeley, or contemporary music—Persky’s clarity and thoughtfulness are well worth the read. Like some of my other favourite writers, he is clearly interested in everything and wants to think deeply about what he encounters: it’s been nice having him as a teacher while I’ve read his book.

2008-04-14T20:17:00.003-04:00

Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, 2006.

I crossed another book off my to read list today, and was surprised to see that I’d neither crossed this one off the list nor blogged about it, though I read it shortly after finishing The City of Words back in the fall.

It’s a lovely book, easy to dip into and read from in tiny pieces at a time—and I’m likely biased, given my own predilections and desire to have (what could justifiably be called) a library of my own, rather than a mere trifling collection of books. Manguel offers fifteen reflections on libraries, each loosely structured around a way of conceiving of a library’s import, meaning, and identity. Yet each of these sets of musings are really more about books in general, and—really—about reading. Consider what Manguel writes in “The Library as Island”:

Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading—once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive—is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good. As our visitor [a gedankenexperiment of a visitor from the past, looking at our reading habits] would eventually realize, in our society reading is nothing but an ancillary act, and the great repository of our memory and experience, the library, is considered less a living entity than an inconvenient storage room.

Hard to see why I might like such a book as this one, isn’t it? I think Manguel is spot on, here. Our society has come to devalue reading, to marginalise it much as the CBC is currently trying to help marginalise art music. Fewer and fewer people admit to me that they have time to read—does being too busy to read really serve as a commendation of one’s own life? Really?—and when they do, it’s usually to complain that it’s not worth the effort, that television provides better entertainment. Reading, Manguel argued when I heard him speak at McMaster just before he gave the Massey lectures, is what keeps us from being barbarians. My own gloss on this idea is that to read is more than to be entertained: it is to remember stories, moments, vibrant images, ideas; reading is an engagement with the real, and it is restorative, invigorating, challenging, and expansive. Reading helps us to make sense of life, and libraries offer the tools to read and to reread, to find new treasures and to re-encounter anew treasures that are only half-remembered.

Manguel’s book is well worth the time spent reading it (I read it mostly on GO train rides into Toronto), both to wonder about our own relationships with libraries and to think again about what a gift reading is in our lives. And as a fun side benefit, you’ll learn both about neat libraries and about neat books. Add this one to your library. You’ll want to return to it.

2008-02-24T17:39:00.003-05:00

This blog started as I was reading Ulysses. In fact, this blog was conceived partly as a way through that book: I’d write an entry after each chapter, or couple of chapters, as a way of keeping myself reading. After that point, it became less about what I read each day and more my first thoughts on the book I had just finished reading, a sort of aide-memoire about what I had read. The entries have not been essays nor reviews, except very occasionally, but rather a journal of my initial impressions. Not every book I have read since the blog began has made its way here, but most of them have. School has rather slowed my progress, of late, and there have not been many that I could add. Complicating matters yet further, I’ve started a very, very long book, and it will be a while before I finish one volume of it—let alone the whole thing. Because of school, and an uncertain future, and because I’ve just started reading In Search of Lost Time, I have decided to return for the next while to a more episodic sort of reading blog: as I finish a chunk of Proust, I’ll blog about the chunk. And, if I decide to keep reading this book after I finish the first volume, you’ll be able to read about my experiences reading Proust for the next four-five years, at the glacial pace I seem to be managing. As an alternative, you could go read the disappointing The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time by Phyllis Rose, and skip my blog until I return to other books. (It’s likely that, with the end of school drawing nigh, I will start blogging about “work books”—i.e., theology, pastoral stuff, group stuff, leadership stuff, biblical criticism—in a way that I have avoided while in school. That means there will be other things interspersed with Proustian chunks.)

So. Part one “Combray” of volume one (Swann’s Way) of In Search of Lost Time. (I own the volumes from the Modern Library paperback printings: "The C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin translation, Revised by D.J. Enright")
Not, perhaps, the best thing to read each night before bed—particularly during the long section musing about memories of not being able to fall asleep, and what races through the narrator’s brain! Throughout “Combray,” I kept empathizing with the narrator: not in details, obviously, but in the way his brain works and makes associations and connections; I felt as though my brain works exactly the same way. Here and there were some brilliant bits that leapt out at me, and I’ve quoted some of them below.

There’s a dazzling array of remembered detail, all of it interesting. The sheer volume slows and lengthens my reading so that my thoughts are nearly at the same speed as what I read: Proust overwhelms me and forces me to slow my pace, to stay in the moment he is describing. Nor are there a lot of natural breaking points, in which I can cease my reading for the night. Because of this latter fact, I find I’m picking a paragraph, ending with it, and returning the next night by reading that same paragraph again—and yet, it’s not hard to remember both the overall course of the story and the details of where I am in it, a fact that is surprising to me given my lack of knowledge of the story.

I think my other major response, to this point, is to wonder how this first section sets the stage for what is to come—and I find myself worrying that I will need to re-read what I have just finished, perhaps many times, to actually get a good feeling for the novel as an entity.

As promised, a few quotations. I don’t always agree with M.P., but I do enjoy his conclusions for what they are and how they emerge; they’re deeply thoughtful.

But none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a real person arouse in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the image was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of real people would be a decided improvement. (116)

…why then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which only we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slow course of their development prevents us from perceiving them. It is the same in life; the heart changes, and it is our worst sorrow; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change. (117)

We try to discover in things, which become precious to us on that account, the reflection of what our soul has projected on to them; we are disillusioned when we find that they are in reality devoid of the charm which the owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering array in order to bring our influence to bear on other human beings who, we very well know, are situated outside ourselves where we can never reach them. (119)

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them; they can inflict on them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies succeeding one another without interruption in the bosom of a family will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician. (209)

2007-12-23T17:38:00.000-05:00

Mike Nickerson, Life, Money & Illusion: Living on Earth as If We Want to Stay, 2006.

Is the way we think about and use money the root of the problems we face as we try to live on our planet in a sustainable way? Nickerson’s (difficult to obtain) book makes a good case to answer that question with a resounding “Yes!”

He argues that conventional economic analysis makes fundamental assumptions that are wrong, and ignores the consequences. Nickerson puts it this way: economics is three-fifths of ecology. Economics concerns itself with “Materials / Processing / Distribution”; Ecology concerns itself with “Natural Resources / Materials / Processing / Distribution / Waste” (124). An economic outlook assumes that the other two aren't important, aren't relevant--an outlook which can lead to all sorts of problems. As just one example: when we think about, say, iPods, Apple tends to worry about obtaining the materials needed to make iPods, making them, and then selling them. Our economic systems don’t encourage Apple to worry about minimizing the use of non-renewable natural resources, or using less renewable resources than can be replenished within the product’s life cycle. Our systems also don’t encourage the concern with safely reclaiming those resources, while minimizing the amount of energy consumed in the entire process. In fact, our systems encourage the opposite: Apple’s shareholders would sell stocks if Apple’s profits don’t continue to grow the company. So, a new version of the iPod gets released each year, and are encouraged by advertising to get the latest—the nano, the video, etc. I’m picking on Apple, but Nickerson’s argument is that this problem is systemic. We measure the well-being of a country by its GDP, and that needs to grow each year. (He makes some interesting points about better measuring systems, too.) Our debt-based money systems and need for compound interest to work as it does (and oh, how timely this seems, given the current crisis with the subprime mortgage issue) encourages us to ignore the other two-fifths of ecology, to continue to use more and more natural resources and to ignore the reclamation of materials.

Nickerson’s book is eminently readable, but it’s complex. He teaches well, and explains the difficult economic concepts which he engages. It’s a book that, whether you know economics well or not (and it’s an area in which I’m weak), will take some time to read because it challenges learned and ingrained presuppositions about things we tend to take for granted—how money works, and so forth. I picked it up because my friend Yaacov recommended it to me, and it’s rewarded my time. It is a persuasive argument that illuminates problems and offers some suggestions about how we might move—and at that, largely within local communities—-toward transforming our world that we may live on it in a sustainable way. It’s a book that will be of interest to anyone concerned by environmental issues; it’s a book that should be read by nearly everyone.

It won’t be, of course, because it challenges accepted wisdom. Moreover, it uses rhetoric like “Global Monopoly Game” in ways that will put off a number of readers. It’s too sloppy with sources. It would be stronger if many of the facts Nickerson relies upon were cited; it would be stronger if the sources he does use weren’t as likely to be perceived, by those who will disagree with his conclusions, as biased themselves. These weaknesses, though, don’t make me hesitate in recommending this book to anyone and everyone.

I am going to end this blog entry by quoting a key set of eight ideas. More information is available at the Sustain Well Being site.

Well-being can be sustained when activities
1) use materials in continuous cycles.
2) use continuously renewable sources of energy.
3) come mainly from the qualities of being human.
(i.e. creativity, communication, movement, appreciation, and spiritual and intellectual development).

Long term well-being is diminished when activities
4) require continual inputs of non- renewable resources.
5) use renewable resources faster than their rate of renewal.
6) cause cumulative degradation of the environment.
7) require resources in quantities that undermine other people’s well-being.
8) lead to the extinction of other life forms.

You’ve read this far. Take another moment to answer Nickerson’s four questions about these principles (349):

Is this what we mean by sustainability?
If it is not, upon what point(s) do we disagree?
For what reasons?
Is there anything missing?

I’d add two more questions:

what can we change about how we live as individuals to live within these principles?
how can we advocate for systemic changes that every human lives within these principles?

I also, before ending this now rather long blog entry, want to quote two sentences that better illuminate principle number three.

...our well-being thrives on the things that come from exercising our own living selves: our senses, our relationships, our creativity, our understanding, and our imagination. These things are the stuff from which ourselves are made.(45)

It’s hard to argue with Nickerson when he makes so much sense, as he does for most of the book. Whether you agree with his point of view and his arguments or not, engaging in this debate is worthwhile. Read his book.

2007-11-20T12:45:00.000-05:00

Stephen Marche, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, 2007.

It’s taken me a long time to come to blog about this book. My normal pattern is to blog quickly; this site is, after all, a reading journal, and I’m trying to catch first thoughts and initial impressions rather than trying to write careful reviews or essays.

I think this book is particularly challenging to write about because I enjoyed it and disliked it. It’s very clever: it purports to be an anthology of fiction (and some criticism) by the North Atlantic island of Sanjania, edited by Marche. By the time you’ve finished reading it, you have a very good sense of what life was like on the island (through at least to the 1960s, when you start to have a sense of what emigrant experience is like). Some of the stories are better than others, but they’re all at least interesting, and so the book held my attention, despite being read across a couple of weeks.

If you have a degree in English, you’re likely to have read such an anthology (of a non-fictional place’s literature), at some point, and the tone of Marche’s editor’s voice and notes is spot on. The stories work together, and reflect a care of selection: indeed, Marche says in one interview that he wrote many more stories, and that this work really is an anthology.

The problem is that the conceit wears thin. [A friend responded to me describing it in a phrase I’m loathe to repeat, but the essence was him suggesting that only pretentious CanLit types would ever pick up the book in a first place. It’s a fair cop.] As intriguing a place as Sanjania is, with its capital city and remote, isolated cove towns—and I would dearly like to visit it—the fiction isn’t sufficiently captivating. The book, ultimately, is not one I expect I will reread, unlike his brilliant first novel, Raymond and Hannah. So. Give this one a miss.

2007-10-16T18:35:00.001-04:00

Alberto Manguel, The City of Words, 2007.

I’ve been fond of Alberto Manguel since first reading A History of Reading. I’m not a fan of his fiction, but his expository work is brilliant, so I was excited to hear that he is giving this year’s Massey lectures. The public lectures began this past Friday; they’ll be broadcast on Ideas in early November (the 5th to the 9th). In the midst of the scheduled lectures are some readings, and I’m looking forward to hearing one, at McMaster next Monday (tickets available from Bryan Prince Bookseller). His argument is that stories offer insight to help us with in the political arena in which we lead our lives.

The first lecture introduced me to Alfred Döblin. Manguel draws a comparison between Döblin and Cassandra, the prophet who was so cursed as not to be believed: Döblin, he suggests, offers a view to a better future through his writing, but is ignored. At the heart of the lecture is one question: what role do stories play in our societal conversations about what society ought to be?
Manguel’s asserts

Under certain conditions, stories can assist us. Sometimes they can heal us, illuminate us, and show us the way. Above all, they can remind us of our condition, break through the superficial appearance of things, and make us aware of underlying currents and depths. (9-10)

Stories can do this because of how they use language. Because unlike “the limiting imagination of bureaucracies”—-and, with them, the limited use of language—-stories “can oppose an open, unlimited mirror-universe of words to help us perceive an image of ourselves together” (27), and thus allow us to build/rebuild/move toward a new organisation possible because of the maker’s craft.

I don’t think it’s an especially easy argument to follow, or to which assent can be readily given. It’s often highly reminiscent of a simple reading of Matthew Arnold, that poetry can be our salvation in a secular world. Manguel is—-appropriately—-much more cautious, but his lectures offer a vision of the prophetic role which literature can play in our, in which language and possibility are too often diminished and ill-used. I am, though, a sympathetic audience.

2007-10-08T16:03:00.000-04:00

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2003.

I picked up Bryson’s book—having been urged to read it for some time now—-in the airport in Glasgow, because I had nothing I wanted to read on the flight home.

Bryson’s book won’t teach you anything you didn’t know, detail-wise, about science if you’re remotely interested in science. So why read it? My answer is that it gave me two things: a light-hearted and amusing look at some of the back-stories that lie behind scientific discovery (and in particular, a view of interesting personalities), and a renewed appreciation for the sense of scale in a scientific approach to the world. The first is light-hearted fun. The second is at turns a delightful reminder of our human egocentrism that allows us to neglect both the vast number of things left to be discovered and the sheer complexity of what we do know; and at others a scary reminder of the precariousness of human life (be it in terms of axial tilt, ice ages, super-volcanoes, diseases, mutation, …). All in all, if you like science, it’s a pleasant read—I bothered to finish it upon my return, albeit slowly—after starting it late in the plane ride following a Robert Ludlum divertissement.

2007-07-25T19:11:00.000-04:00

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss, 2006.

This novel is the first time I've read Desai. I heard of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, but I haven't picked it up. In fact, I don't know what prompted me to pick up The Inheritance of Loss. Some of my friends make it a habit to read the Booker winners (and nominees), but it's never been one of my habits.

It's an odd book. There are gorgeous moments of lyrical prose, but the book feels almost too composed. It begins in medias res; its plot lines are slight and ephemeral. Ostensibly, the story revolves around Sai, who goes to live with her grandfather when her parents are killed. In India, near Nepal, Sai, her grandfather, and the cook have the shape of their lives changed dramatically as the Gorkha National Liberation Front begins to push for a separate Gorkha state. Interwoven into this context is the story of the cook's son, an illegal immigrant in New York City. There are major plot points: Sai falls in love with her maths tutor, who falls in with the GNLF. The lives of their neighbours are shifted and turned upside down by the GNLF. We see the history of the grandfather, as he studies at Cambridge, and returns to be a member of the Indian Civil Service as a judge. We see his own tortured marriage. To my reading, though, the story is less important than the atmosphere, and the books that Desai shows Sai and Noni and Lola (two neighbours) reading themselves point to the greater importance of milieu than of plot. It is a story of a particular place at a particular time, and how people living their lives are swept up by, or have their lives changed by, the events going on around them that they themselves might prefer to have remain peripheral.

It's an intriguing book, and a quick read. I'm certainly glad I picked it up. It's not, though, one I think I'll return to.

2007-07-22T22:18:00.001-04:00

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 2007.

Do you not know what happens in the book yet? If you don't want to know, don't read this blog entry. I'm not much for summarizing plot, but I'm not going to conceal it. Deal with your own issues elsewhere.

This blog entry is in two parts.

Part I: The book itself.
A writer to Salon commented that Rowling's prose is sturdy. It's unexceptional, but it's fun and it suits the purpose. It's not Tolkien, and it's not art. It is quite entertaining, though. An associate writes that much of the book is filler, as Ron and Hermione and Harry wander through England without a real plan. It's dull. Note to JKR: not having an editor? Dumb idea on your part. There are moments of levity, but most of the book is an attempt to be as well-done with the chapter ending cliff-hangers as is a novel by Dan Brown; Rowling doesn't do it as well. Harry's death is poorly written; the train station scene ludicrous. The entire situation lacks the pathos needed. The fights through the climax are fine, but I have the sense that characters were introduced in other books so I'd care that they're killed off now; with few exceptions, I was not much moved. Ho hum.
The part which I found baffling was the postlude set 19 years into the future, with a happily married Harry, complete with three kids. I recognize that some people aren't happy unless they know everything turns out well, but the postlude was just silly.
The book is quite good for children's pulp.

Part II: Spoiler silliness

Right. Anyone remember the beginning of Romeo and Juliet?

Chor. Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventur'd piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, naught could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

The eminent playwright begins the play by telling you EVERYTHING that will happen. I don't remember people being upset about this when Luhrman's version was splashed on movie screens across the globe. Yet, for the last months, there has been inch after inch of copy filled with news of the embargo on this book. Who's been feeding spoilers? There's surely a special hell for those people!

I have no sympathy for this crap. What happens is never as important as how it happens. Little Nell dies, people. So does Smike. If you missed it being telegraphed when they were first introduced, it doesn't matter. The HOW matters, and that's the point of the sonnet I've quoted above. I've grown weary of the idea that knowing what happens "spoils" what is to come. That's just not the way books have ever worked for me. /rant.

2007-07-18T22:54:00.000-04:00

Benjamin Constant, Adolphe, first version published in 1816.

The eponymous protagonist falls in love with Ellenore, a woman who is the secure mistress of Comte de P.--; he woos her, and she leaves the Count. The two characters are then unhappy until Ellenore’s death.

That’s actually how short Constant’s supposedly semi-autobiographical novel seems. There’s little action. Nearly every word is Adolphe reflecting on what is happening, rather than him describing the plot. There are moments of great beauty, but I found it hard at times to connect with the musings because they were often so detached from the plot. Adolphe speaks, time and again, of his weakness, and his inability to break things off with Ellenore, but most of those words felt forced to me, and lacked much in the way of passion. I do think a better than passing understanding of how society worked in the time period might well help me the better to connect, but this novel seems more ripe for a good Merchant Ivory film adaptation than for me to reread it, slight though it was.

2007-07-10T22:18:00.000-04:00

Martin L. Smith, The Word is Very Near You: A Guide to Praying with Scripture, 1989.

I had this book recommended to me by my spiritual director quite a space back, and on first glance, fell in love with it. I read the first chapter, thought that it was bang-on, and then school interrupted my reading. I took advantage of another educational moment to read it in its entirety, and its initial lustre seems to have faded for me.
Smith begins with a relaxed and informal introduction to what prayer can be, how it can be the placing of ourselves into a position from which we can more easily listen for the movement of the Spirit in our lives. He engages and makes sense of popular misconceptions, and attempts to de-mystify prayer while retaining a sense of its necessity and rewards.
It’s the second part of the book that disappointed me. While the ideas are sound, I found myself reacting against the book: Smith feels prescriptive as he outlines meditation, lectio divina, and contemplation as options for prayer. Unsurprisingly, he privileges stillness in a way as to make my kinetic self deeply uncomfortable.
I need to give some of his ideas a fair chance, but this book is unlikely to be the wondrous tool for merging encountering scripture and prayer together that I at first hoped it would be. I think it's likely a great book for people who are just encountering these ideas for the first time, or for whom stillness is more likely to be a rewarding part of their prayer life, than it was for me.

2007-07-09T21:50:00.000-04:00

Reread: Raymond and Hannah by Stephen Marche. I have little to add, since my last reading of the book a few years back. I picked it up off the shelf a couple of weeks back to read from, just to skim, as I was waiting for L- to be ready for us to go off somewhere. I kept reading. I really do think that, overall, the book is very good. It captures lust, longing, and love--or at least, with regards to the latter, its absence--so ridiculously well that Marche remains on my Keats List. Hmph.

2007-07-08T21:33:00.000-04:00

Diana Wynne Jones, Archer’s Goon, 1984.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve reread this book. I just so enjoy falling back into Howard’s world, as he puzzles out the seven siblings who “farm” various aspects of life in the town in which his family lives. It’s one of those wacky bildungsromans that can only happen in a brilliant fantasy world that is so closely tied to reality and yet so far from it at the same time. Part of my fascination is that I identify with Howard, as he daydreams and constructs spaceships in his head; part of it is that I long for adventure and mystery. Plus, a goon just sounds like fun.
How can one dislike a book that begins by identifying facts it will prove? They're not boring and trivial facts, either, but are essential and life-changing facts like “All power corrupts, but we need electricity” and “It pays to increase your word power.” Like most of Wynne Jones’ books, this one is fun and silly, and repays rereads. A nice divertissement.

2007-06-19T21:18:00.000-04:00

Annie Dillard, The Maytrees, 2007.

Dillard’s novel is elegant and spare. It is, in fact, so spare as to lack much of a plot: rather it is a story of two lives, intertwining and growing apart and back together in unexpected ways. Much like her essays, the telling of the story uses detailed observations woven together with allusions and direct reference to ideas, poems, and stories, and almost all conclusions are left for the reader to discern.

It’s an intriguing book, slow-paced and told by a narrator content to jump ahead in time and then back again, as she traces the course of lovers who fit together and yet jar at the same time. Her depiction of Cape Cod is stunning in its detail, but more stunning still is Dillard showing life: offering facts without drooling admiringly over love, she allows the reader to come to a sense of what it is to live: how one finds and pursues avocation, and how one relates to the others in life. The novel is delightful; I don’t think it will find a wide audience. It circles away from its story, and reveals in ways so apart from the norm that I think it would take, if not a fan of Dillard’s work, at least a determined reader to move through its economy of telling two lives. Like all Dillard, though, it challenges the reader to grow into something more: it’s a wonderfully revealing prism into what I—and you—believe life to be.

2007-06-13T22:46:00.000-04:00

Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves, 1994 (this collection).

I find it onerous to try to write anything sensible about a book by Calvino, even after reading slowly and carefully. This difficulty troubles me all the more because I greatly enjoy Calvino’s ethereal writing that both reveals and obfuscates, that shares inner motives and outer details but hides an essential and unnameable aspect of the stories and draws me in yet deeper. I could cheat, and quote the happy text on the back of the book:

an almost miraculous balance between the real and the imaginary, the familiar and the fabulous. Calvino transforms the lives of ordinary people into brilliant explorations of intricate interior worlds. Blending reality and illusion with elegance and precision, he weaves into his writing instants of recognition in which he cherishes deceptions and illusions of love swept away.

The jacket captures some of the appeal of this collection of nine short stories, one longer story, and one novella that all revolve around love un-attained, or love overpowered by a love from self rather than a love for other, or… Two of the short stories are, to my mind, pure genius: the adventure of the reader, and the adventure of the photographer. In both tales, the protagonist is unable—though desirous—of leaving behind a passion for an action in favour of a passion for a person, in differing ways that are brilliantly honest.

I’m going to stop trying to write about this book, now. It’s very good, and I strongly recommend it. The photographer’s adventure is the perfect compliment/antidote to anyone currently wrestling with Baudrillard; but the book is fun, and well-worth the slowness of reading stories by Calvino.

2007-05-26T18:22:00.000-04:00

Vincent Lam, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, 2005.

Yes, it was after I knew it was a Giller nominee, and even the winner, that I added this book to my to-read list. I fell in love with it. The stories are short, and sharp. Lam writes with a voice that is at once detached and at the same time deeply caring for his characters. I really am starting to think that I have a problem with collections of linked stories; they’re a form I find hard to resist.

I think that what makes this collection so inviting is the way that the characters draw the reader into their excitements and their challenges. Reading the stories that centre on Fitz, I had a very deep sense of who he is and what motivates him, his passion for medicine, and his growing problems with what I would term accidie. Chen’s passion for medicine is accented with his desire to avoid conflict and his need to have others be happy—and the limits of that need, tinged with impatience. As I floated through the medical world of these doctors—but especially these two central characters—they felt alive to me, revealed through their actions because of the careful crafting of the stories themselves, rather than merely being told who they are and what motivates them.

Lam’s book is well worth a careful read or two. It’s also enough to convince me that I’d love to teach a class on Canadian linked story-cycles…

2007-05-20T13:14:00.000-04:00

Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero, 2007.

The English Patient was for me one of those books that changed the way I read. I think what I responded to was something I’d call opacity: the way Ondaatje simultaneously reveals and hides facets of the characters and details of the plot to create a landscape and mood at once clearly visible and at the same time cloudy and uncertain. This opacity of writing seemed to capture something of what life was like, a verisimilitude that I had yet to encounter or perceive in any other writer.

I’ve since read all of Ondaatje’s other work, and spent time writing about it and even teaching his work. While I’ve enjoyed much of his other work, The English Patient has remained a touchstone text for me, along with a couple of the poems that act in similar ways. Where Coming Through Slaughter and In the Skin of a Lion try to accomplish this opacity, they’re not quite as good as my first encounter; Anil’s Ghost was a tremendous disappointment to me. He’s sufficiently important, though, that I needed to read Divisadero.

It’s a strong novel, perhaps as good in my estimation as In the Skin of a Lion. The first half of it revolves around two daughters and an almost-brother, a family and a relationship with it that is fractured irretrievably by an episode of violence. The sisters part company, and the father is a figure lost in mist thereafter, referred to only vaguely. Each sister bears the scars—an important idea indeed for Ondaatje—of this encounter as they progress through their respective lives, and the scar tissue is rubbed and agitated in a variety of new encounters and relationships. The second half revolves around the life of a poet, and the relationships in his life. These two portions are interwoven only minimally, and I’m glad for the serendipity of just having finished reading some of Dillard! (In fact, Ondaatje quotes a beautiful portion of Dillard near-ish to the end of the book.) The reader is left to make connections for herself or himself, and to come to whatever understanding of the story is possible for her life or his life. In fact, I think the connection is left perhaps too tenuous, and just a few scattered lines might have left me thinking of this book as an interconnected whole rather than two intriguing novellas linked so very barely.

It's a good book, and well worth the read. For me, though, it's no The English Patient.

2007-04-27T23:18:00.000-04:00

Annie Dillard, For the Time Being, 1999.

I re-read, from time to time. You may, reading this entry, be interested in reading about the last time I read this book--though I said even less about it, then, in January of 2004.

There’s an elusiveness to Dillard’s musings. She presents an idea, and then a story. A reflection, and another story, and another idea. Seemingly unconnected they weave together with a lack of tangibility akin to the attempt to dance about architecture.

This book about life, and its essential nature as ephemeral. About death, and its pervasiveness. About meaning, in a life lived—and that lack of tangibility beyond a mere moment. About theodicy, and about what it means to believe, to be in relationship with God.

There is a striking beauty in this patchwork quilt of ideas, thoughts, and reflections. The spare-ness of Dillard’s writing combines with the weight of the subject and with her unflagging sense of wonder in the face of life, death, God, and existence, to create a book that is not sum-up-able in a short post on this blog. Rather, the book is an experience designed to awaken questions in the mind of the reader, and to provide an organising metaphor or two—to provide an image—that might help the reader struggle with these perennial questions. Dillard returns, time and again, to the prayers of thanksgiving of the Jewish community, at every aspect (both positive and negative) of life, and to the thought and wonder of the Jesuit geologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I don’t know if the second will provide lasting insight for me. Certainly, the contrast between the vastness of time of geologic processes and the brevity of our lived experience is telling, but I feel a degree of being unsettled that makes me long for some of the unwoven threads of this book to be more neatly tied together. I don’t yet know if that’s a desire reflective of an incompleteness that should not be, or of an incompleteness that is me not yet fully engaged with the questions Dillard raises for me. I do know it’s a book to which I will need to return.

2007-04-25T21:54:00.001-04:00

Paul Gibson, Discerning the Word: The Bible and Homosexuality in Anglican Debate, 2000.

I want to be Paul Gibson. Well, in fairness, it’d be more accurate to say that I have a deep and abiding respect for the Rev. Dr. Paul Gibson. He writes and speaks with astounding clarity and insight, and is to my mind the epitome of someone whose attempt to articulate issues of faith honestly and prayerfully, with the deepest possible commitment to engaging fully with scripture, reason, and tradition.

His book is interesting enough on the issue of homosexuality and the church, but what makes me appreciate it more deeply still is his care and sensitive approach to how scripture has been read, and how scripture should be read. For example:

It is possible to treat the Bible in exactly the way earlier generations of Christians treated the person of Jesus and the sacrament of the Last Supper. [that is, particularising one aspect in such detail as to move into heresy] It is possible to deny the human, the this-world dimension of the Bible and with the same devastating results.

Gibson offers a path for reading and engaging with scripture in a way that finds a via media between Bibliolatry and the dismissal of the Bible as mere human scratchings, and his path is a clear statement of how I myself think the Bible should be read. Someday, I’d like to be able to articulate such things as well as does the Rev. Dr. Gibson. It's a book well worth reading, to think about how to be with scripture.

For some online wisdom from the Rev. Dr. Gibson, read through his response to the St. Michael report.

2007-04-24T23:38:00.000-04:00

David Rakoff, Don’t Get Too Comfortable, 2005.

I met Rakoff as I met David Sedaris: through listening to NPR’s This American Life. Someday I will recover from my desire to have Ira Glass’s job. Maybe.

This collection of essays is not, generally, laugh-out-loud funny. It’s thoughtful: Rakoff muses and considers. He shares personal experiences, and the essays feel almost like magazine pieces, if the magazine in question happened to be The Believer. They range from experiencing a private resort to fasting, from becoming an American citizen to foraging for food in the wilderness of New York City, and so forth.

My favourite piece is “J.D.V., M.I.A.” In it, Rakoff describes participating in a scavenger hunt in which one elaborate clue leads to the next; I identify strongly with his relative inability to solve the brainteasers, and feeling out-of-place with those who can. For me, it happens when I try to engage with a cryptic crossword: I might get one or two answers, but my brain doesn’t turn sideways that way. Present in the essay is an admiration combined with a sense of self-recognition and self-awareness that appeals strongly to me.

The pieces are pleasant. They are occasionally sharp and acerbic, but never mean. Rakoff tends to move toward a flatter, more descriptive prose style that lacks emotional content, when he wants to convey disappointment or other negative perceptions of some subject, and that habit gives the book a charitable, polite tone. It’s an engaging read, well-worth the time it will take you.

2007-04-06T17:53:00.000-04:00

David Mitchell, Black Swan Green, 2006.

Despite internship pressure, despite the busy-ness of Holy Week, I finished a novel that I thought was going to take me a lot longer to read. Black Swan Green is, you see, brutal. It is brilliantly written; it is a compelling read. Its sharply accurate portrayal of childhood, though, is brilliant.

The story is part general bildungsroman and part künstlerroman. Describing it that way might well frighten off people who have been forced to read too many of such things—ah, Wilhelm Meister, and your apprenticeship!—but Mitchell’s story of Jason Taylor as he moves from childhood to a more adult view of the world, and into someone who begins to take his art seriously—is fresh and entirely enjoyable.

It’s told from Taylor’s perspective, complete with daydreams, nightmares, and musings. The nasty pecking order of middle school, and bullies, and the sheer miserable-ness of other miserable people combined to bring back repressed memories in myself, which floods may well explain why I found it a brutal book to read. Taylor falls in love, watches the turmoil in his family, and tries to make sense of what it is to want to read and to write when such things are “gay”—and how desperately, madly, does he want to fit in and to be popular! Yet given opportunities for advancement, he rejects them when they conflict with his own developing moral sense. Jason’s the kind of kid you’d be happy to call your own: earnest, and trying to do the right thing. You just wouldn’t want him to have to go through his travails.

I’m making it sound like a dire book, but it’s infused as well with a gentle, self-deprecating humour. I can’t recommend it highly enough; Black Swan Green is a wonderful book, and one I’d like to see widely read.

2007-04-01T20:40:00.000-04:00

Susan Howatch, Glamorous Powers, 1988.

I mentioned the first one in this series some weeks ago, and my thoughts about this one are much the same. It's a decent book, but not quite what I hoped for. Heavy on the Freudian analysis. Far less plausible than the first; I have trouble believing that the central character of this book, Jon Darrow, could have been so effective a spiritual director in the first book with his own self so unbalanced. The notion of glamorous powers is intriguing, though--and the book explores well how misused they can be in ministry and within the church.

I'm not convinced I'm going to read the other four novels any time soon, but we'll see. I'll want to relax with pulp this summer.

2007-02-19T22:09:00.000-05:00

Essays and Reviews, 1860. Eds. Victor Shea and William Whitla (2000)

I’m nearing the end of my second year of a three-year program at Trinity College. That has not meant less reading, as the decrease in blog postings might suggest, but reflects a decision I made at the beginning of last year. I have not blogged about the books I have read for classes. There have been a large number of such books, but when one is writing essays and assignments, a blog is not the place in which to work out the beginnings of my thoughts about these texts.

This book, though, is one I started reading some time ago, and the sidebar of this blog advertised for a long time that I was reading it. Last term, I designed a reading course around it, and now that that course is out of the way, I felt it appropriate to blog about the book now.

Essays and Reviews is a massively important book to the history of Anglicanism. It reshaped how people thought about the Bible; it reshaped how people approached the discussion of religious norms. To describe its publication as beginning a revolution would not be an exercise in hyperbole.

Before I take a quick look at the seven essays and reviews which form this book, as it was first published in 1860, I want to discuss briefly the importance of this particular edition. William Whitla and Victor Shea, of York University, have produced an apparatus that brings this book back to life. The ideas of Essays and Reviews are far from daring in contemporary Anglican thought, and so the real value of reading the book now lies in the field of social history, or the history of ideas. It is difficult to do such a reading, though, because of a loss of context. The copious notes provided for each essay by Shea and Whitla restore this context: they translate the fragments included in original languages, left untranslated in other publications of Essays and Reviews; they explicate history and allusions; and they make clear which points were disputed and why, offering an entry into the ludicrously vast collection of secondary literature about this book. Their masterful introduction not only explicates the essays themselves and gives requisite biographical information about their respective authors, but also situates the book within the context of the Victorian church far better than many book length studies of the issues. (One might well argue that their writing is itself book-length! This tome, after all, with introduction, essays, supporting material, bibliography, and information about both the publication history and the heresy trials of the authors, weighs more than a large sack of sugar, and is more than 9.5” by 6.5” by 3”. It’s not light reading material!)

Seven pieces comprise the original text. Frederick Temple (later Archbishop of Canterbury) contributed a piece entitled “The Education of the World,” a rather Victorian look at progress in humanity’s evolution and life of faith. Rowland Williams was tried for heresy for his review, “Bunsen’s Biblical Researches.” Nominally a look at a German theologian, Williams used Bunsen’s ideas as a basis for his own assertion of principles of higher criticism. Baden Powell’s essay, “On the Study of the Evidence of Christianity” is a rejection of the type of logic so inextricably associated with Paley. Henry Bristow Wilson’s interesting essay is called “Scéances Historique de Genève: The National Church,” a critical look at the Church of England. Charles Wycliffe Goodwin’s contribution, “Mosaic Cosmogony” is a look at the relevance of geological sciences and the accepted history of the world from a faith perspective (Ah, Archbishop Ussher and the world being created in exactly 4004 BC!). Benjamin Jowett's essay is about the proper interpretation of scripture. The final essay, and one of the most intriguing, is a brilliant work of history by Mark Pattison, “Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750.”

None of the essays are particularly earth-shattering to modern ears, and it’s hard to feel the storm of excitement that arose because of this book. So why look for the excitement? Well, for two reasons. The first is that, in 1860, the world (by which I mean people in England who could read) cared—about poetry, science, and religion. They cared about ideas, and so it’s interesting to try to gain some sense of what that was like. The second reason is that the controversy around Essays and Reviews was largely confined to the Church of England, and was principally about how to read the Bible. It’s an argument in which the Anglican Church, now even more widespread, finds itself engaged. Moreover, the actual details of the argument have not shifted much. Does, then, Essays and Reviews offer us some solution? Certainly if history repeats itself, things would look bright for the more liberal side: some trials and tribulation, followed by an acceptance of correctness? While I doubt that things will fall out in quite so simple a repetition of the past, Essays and Reviews—in the remarkably large Shea & Whitla edition—is well worth the time it takes to engage with a fascinating period in the life of the Church.

2007-02-18T17:53:00.000-05:00

Susan Howatch, Glittering Images, 1987.

DW suggested that I take a look at this series of six novels, telling me that each of the novels is a compelling read. It sounds uninteresting when described as a history of the Church of England in the twentieth century, told in specific narratives—but judging by this first volume, I agree with DW.

Glittering Images is the story of Dr. Charles Ashworth, a cathedral canon and Fellow at Laud’s College, Cambridge, and the protégé of ++Cantaur, Dr. William Cosmo Gordon Lang. Following a public spat in the House of Lords between the Archbishop and bishop of the fictional diocese of Starbridge, revolving around A.P. Herbert’s divorce bill, the Archbishop sends Ashworth to Starbridge ostensibly to investigate whether Bishop Jardine might be vulnerable to gossip in the tabloids. While there, Ashworth finds himself immersed in a familial mystery, and finds himself in a spiritual crisis. He retreats to an abbey, and the new abbot challenges him to deal with the traumas that have brought him to this point. I found Ashworth’s story compelling, and though the details of his journey are far different from my own, some odd similarities caused me to have a new look at my own spiritual life. Given tools to help him in his life, Ashworth re-emerges to grapple with the mystery and situation in which he finds himself immersed.

The novel is fascinating. Much of the story is told through dialogue, and certainly the novel has a greater appeal if one is passing familiar with both the history of the Church of England and theology. Regardless, it is a novel I read in a gulp, reluctant to pause, although I have marked passages to which I want to return. It is a romance, as much as anything else, and its only real flaw is that one might well think Ashworth’s recovery an easy path—akin to the psychiatrist who can cure a patient within a half-hour television episode—rather than the more difficult journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance that it actually represents. The book is, as well, a remarkable look at the church in the late ’30s, in the midst of trying to make sense of a great deal of change in social mores and behaviours. I’m quite looking forward to the second volume.

2007-02-15T18:14:00.000-05:00

Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y, 2006.

I read a review of this book in Salon, and was intrigued. It’s an interesting story, well-done (though falls down a bit at the end). A magazine writer becomes a Ph.D. student in English literature, taking a look at 19th century gedankexperimenten. Ariel stumbled into this life: she happened on a presentation about a book, The End of Mr. Y, by an author named Thomas Lumas—a book that is notorious as cursed.

Her supervisor disappears, leaving her somewhat at odds, and she just happens to find a copy of the book—and, despite the curse, reads it. Wackiness ensues as Ariel enters another world based on instructions that are part of the novel. As worlds collide, Thomas weaves together philosophy—quite the fan of both Heidegger and Derrida—and modern physics, not overly well but not too poorly, either. She sometimes loses both plot and characters, and gets distracted, because this book really is a novel of ideas—though she finds her way back to both.

It’s suspenseful, and it plays well with ideas about what language is, and what it does. It’s a fun read, made more fun by some familiarity with philosophy and science—and more fun still if you’re interested in a fascinating romance about what University life is like, filled with sex and intrigue. Ariel finds herself chased, in mortal danger at every turn, before coming to a solution that seems almost too easy but costs her dreadfully. It's a book worth its read.

2007-02-14T10:03:00.000-05:00

Gary Wills, What Paul Meant, 2006.

Wills romps through Paul’s writings in an effort to reclaim what he sees as the—too often occluded—true message of Paul. He argues that Paul did not “subvert” the true message of Jesus, but rather that Paul is transformed by his encounter with the risen Jesus, and so seeks constantly to find the fullness of his Jewish faith as expressed through Jesus. Much of the book is taken up with addressing the concerns of specific criticisms of Paul’s writing. Wills makes an effort to rebut those who charge Paul with anti-Semitism, misogyny; he offers another look at Paul’s relationships with Rome and with Jerusalem. It’s a much better book than Wills’ earlier book, What Jesus Meant, though it’s nowhere near as strong a book, for example, as Donald Akenson’s Saint Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus—a book that accomplishes the same tasks, but with more depth. The difference between the two is that Wills’ book is aimed at a popular audience, and Akenson’s requires more of its readers.

2007-02-10T16:49:00.000-05:00

Diana Wynne Jones, The Pinhoe Egg, 2006.

My mother the children’s librarian handed me this book, and said, do you have a moment to review it? I thought to myself a) It’s by Diana Wynne Jones! b) Its main character is Cat (Eric) Chant!

I’ve missed Cat since the last time I read Charmed Life. He really is one of my favourite creations of DWJ. The story itself revolves around a feud between two witching families who are hoping to avoid the attention of Chrestomanci and his staff. Complicating matters are woods that repel visitors from Chrestomanci Castle, a rambunctious horse, an eager young griffin, and the mechanical antics of Roger Chant and his new friend, Joe Pinhoe. Alternating between the perspectives of Cat and Marianne Pinhoe, the story tells how the village moves to a new understanding of what life is supposed to be. It is a worthy sequel, full of secrets from grown-ups, and the stark contrast between parents who know how to leave room for children to grow and those who believe that the way to raise a child is to exercise constant control.

I think what I like best about this world is how individual magic is, and this book begins to explore how Cat and Marianne think and do magic. At another level, it’s about growing up and learning where one’s gifts lie, and how to use those gifts. As I read the book, my wife kept coming into the room and ask my why I was smiling and laughing—the novel is a lot of fun.

2007-01-28T22:36:00.000-05:00

Kim Moritsugu, Old Flames, 1999.

This novel is another one of those books that came to me via the Library after I had forgotten what hard prompted me to read the book itself. This process is happening more and more frequently; it’s enough to make me seriously concerned about my memory.

At any rate, Moritsugu’s novel is well-written and interesting, though more concerned with people and feelings than with plot, which truth may explain away the awkward deus ex machina ending. The story revolves two woman: one a suburban housewife, and the other an up-and-coming advertising executive who has just left New York to take over the Toronto office. The latter is obsessed with an old boyfriend—hence the title—and the missed possibilities that she remembers from her teenage years. The former woman remembers both her pre-married and pre-children years, and her own career in public relations, and comes to wonder about an old flame of her own.

It is a competent novel about regret and the acceptance of one’s life, and has flashes of pellucid writing, but I found it somewhat uneven. [It is published by one of my favourite Canadian presses, Porcupine’s Quill, and reminded me for reasons I can’t fully articulate a novel called Buying on Time, by Antanas Sileika.]

2007-01-02T16:20:00.000-05:00

Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant, 2006.

My systematic theology professor mentioned this short little book last year, as he tried to make sense for us of the relevance of the study of the historical Jesus to systematics.

The professor likes this book because it moves beyond the insipid WWJD crap that seems all too prevalent these days, and I like that about it too. Wills tries to get a sense of who Jesus is, and what he was saying. Wills answers return time and again to the idea of “heaven’s reign,” and he wrestles with the various parables to explain both how wondrous such a vision is, as well as how different it is, how difficult it is to wrap one’s mind around it.

My problem with the book is that, in many ways, it’s simplistic. The gospels are smushed together to create one story: from that story Wills extracts his conception of heaven’s reign, and builds a theological framework. The gospels, though, are both simultaneously one story and four-plus stories: they’re about God, and his interaction with us, but they have different concerns and say different things about who Jesus is. How can any worthwhile semblance of Christology be built without acknowledging that fact, and without showing an attempt to grapple with that difficulty?

I like the focus of the book; I like many of Wills’ conclusions. I’m looking forward to reading the book he wrote immediately afterwards, What Paul Meant. But I’m not expecting much more than a couple of hours of mild engagement. What I’m really looking forward to finally reading is my untouched copy of Wink's The Powers that Be.

2006-12-17T10:57:00.000-05:00

Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics: A Novel, 2006.

This odd novel is the story of a young woman, Blue, who, with her father, settles in a town for an entire year from his nomadic existence as a constant visiting professor of political science. She is absorbed into the elite group at her new school, under the wing of an odd and yet luminous teacher, Hannah Schneider. Meeting the group each Sunday for dinner—pretending to her father that it is a discussion group of Ulysses that never progresses past “Telemachus”—Blue is drawn into a world of drinking and licentiousness, made better only by the group’s relationship with the mysterious Hannah… until Blue finds Hannah has killed herself (such fact not to be construed as a spoiler; revealed on page two before we even meet Hannah).

It’s an odd sort of bildungsroman, entirely unsatisfying as we don’t really see Blue grow or develop as a person, or not much anyway. The mystery side of the plot is intriguing, and reasonably well done. The style of the piece is why I had a difficult time reading the book. Laura Miller, in her review in Salon writes: “If only Pessl wouldn't try so hard to convince us that she is a novelist of grand, American-style ambition; she seems to think that if you fling enough metaphors at your readers' heads, their ducking can be interpreted as bows of reverence.” Miller’s inclined to forgive Pessl because some of the metaphors are wonderful: I agree, but am not convinced that this is an excuse. I wonder, though, how much of that is Pessl, and how much is Blue, because Blue is the narrator.

The book itself is arranged in a syllabus. Each chapter is titled with the name of a (at least semi-) canonical work, beginning with Othello and A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man and ending with The Secret Garden and Metamorphoses. There’s an odd postlude of a final exam (14 true/false, 7 multiple choice, 1 essay—and we’re instructed to take “all the time you need”). The structure is too precious by half, but what really bothers me is the pseudo-post-modern references to other works. Barely one paragraph goes by without some reference to another book, film, painting. In part, this technique fits both with the syllabus conceit and with Pessl’s establishment of Blue as a voracious reader. What bothers me is that it never seems anything other than sloppy writing. I suspect this is personal preference, but I feel that allusions should be allusive—half-hidden, not always fully revealed, casting a glance to another work. Pessl’s technique, though, names another piece and asks that an understanding of it be sorted by the reader into the novel. I never stopped thinking that it was sloppy writing. In fairness, Pessl is far from being the only writer who does this: but I want them all to stop it. Between this and Eliot, there’s room for sensible allusions!

2006-12-09T13:02:00.000-05:00

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace, 1999.

I've been meaning to read something by Coetzee since he won the Nobel prize three years ago. Disgrace was mentioned on some CBC show I happened to be listening to, a few weeks back, and so I decided to pick it up as some seasonal reading for procrastination from paper writing.

It's the story of an English prof at the Technical University of Capetown. He is forced to teach writing, but is allowed one course of his own choosing: in his case, Romantic poetry. He has a sudden and impulsive affair with a student from his tutorial, and is unwilling to repent. He joins his daughter on an isolated farm. They are savagely attacked; he is burned, and she is raped. She is unwilling to act as he thinks she should, and their relationship shifts and is changed.

It's a novel about ideas, as much as anything else: Professor Lurie is attempting to write an opera about Byron, out on the farm, and in a way, his thought is consumed by the idea of relationships: with the prostitutes he hires, with his ex-wife, his daughter, with the student with whom he has the liaison, with her parents. It's a novel that wrestles with ideas of repentance, amends, right-living, racism, and the way place informs life. It feels almost opaque: one does not get a clear, omniscient view of Lurie's feelings--actually, I'm not convinced Lurie has any real sense of what he feels at most points--from the narration. That absence left me thinking more about the ideas, and the relatively sparse action.

It is a good book, certainly well worth reading. It's quite short. I daresay I'll end up reading a few more by Coetzee, when I can make time. Silly school.

2006-09-30T12:01:00.000-04:00

Leah McLaren, The Continuity Girl, 2006.

I read McLaren's column each week in the Globe. I am... more of Russell Smith's camp, when it comes to how I feel about McLaren. She writes of a world that I don't wish to be part of, but does it with sufficient verve and insight that I read the column.

The story is that of Meredith Moore, a script supervisor--who manages to get fired twice--desperate to have a child, belaboured with hippy and wacky mother, heavy-drinking unstable friend, and an odd relationship with her gynecologist. Yes, you read that correctly: and yes, such a summary should be enough to convince you not to read the book. Just to reinforce that conclsion, I will say the following.

The book is trite, and unimpressive. I'm not a fan of the term chick-lit, or the ubiquitous references to Sex & the City (Toby Young's blurb on the back cover reads "Leah McLaren is Canada's Carrie Bradshaw and a wit for the ages."), but I'm at a loss for describing the book in any other terms. It is disposable, relies heavily on more than one happy deus ex machina, and reads like a month-old, four-times warmed-over version of Twelfth Night.

So. Waste of time, could have been reading something good, and far too long an entry on such a book. Now, to go re-read The Undertaking for a paper.

2006-09-24T11:19:00.000-04:00

Michael Schwartzentruber, ed., The Emerging Christian Way, 2006. Contributions from Marcus Borg, Tim Scorer, Tom Harpur, Thomas Berry, Sallie McFague, Matthew Fox, Bruce Sanguin, Anne Squire, Bill Phipps, Mack MacLean, Bruce Harding, Susan Burt, Donald Grayston, Nancy Reeves, and the editor.

This is a decent collection of essays. It's one of those books that didn't particularly grab me, because I've read chunks of most of these authors before, and none of them really said anything new or dramatic--which is only to be expected, given that many of these pieces have been previously published elsewhere.

I enjoyed Borg's piece more than most of his books that I've read, perhaps because it articulates quite clearly a vision for which I have great sympathy, of faith-in-action, working to bring about the reign of God.

Harpur was Harpur, talking about the historic creeds as stumbling blocks, and the need for creeds more based on a faith that stresses the nature of our relationship with God as transformational. I thought that his offering of a new creed was weak, though he is clear that it's only a starting point. (A better couple of possible starting points, to my mind, can be found in the New Zealand prayer book.) Matthew

Fox's piece struck me as self-serving and egocentric. Bill Phipp's essay was quietly interesting, and worth further thought.

Grayston's thoughts on pastoral care--and really, about faith development--might well be the best thing in the book.

All in all, it's a spotty collection. It's one of those books to dip into, to get myself thinking, but not something that offers a lot of framework or leading ideas, nor really, anything but the questions I bring.

2006-09-23T14:44:00.000-04:00

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, 2004.

W-- recommended this book to me, back in May, and I've been meaning to read it all this time. The book is beyond genius. It's one of the best things I've read in ages, though in many ways, it's unrelentingly bleak. It's hard to escape a line that appears near the end that in many ways sums up the nature of the stories in the novel: Mitchell quotes from the Aeneid, and writes "sunt lacrimae rerum". The line in context is from 1.426: "sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt", "these are the tears of things, and our mortality cuts to the heart."

It's not a happy book, but it's ingenious. A series of six stories, like nestled Russian dolls--an image that comes up in the book more than once, and to which Mitchell refers in this interview--they're intricately linked. "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" turns out to be a torn book in the second story, "Letters from Zedelghem", and so on to the central story "Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After", and then back out again. Described in this way, the novel sounds precious, and hard to read: too intentionally post-modern to be of interest. It's anything but. Each of the six stories is compelling. They're allusive, and post-modern, to be sure, but intriguing and brilliantly told. I had a great deal of trouble putting the book down, especially as I read through the second, concluding parts of each story. Each one is fascinating, though I think I enjoyed "An Orison of Somni-451" and "Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After" the best.

At any rate. Go forth, and read. It's an amazing book, and I can't wait to read more Mitchell.

2006-09-22T16:12:00.000-04:00

Philip Pulman, the trilogy "His Dark Materials":
The Golden Compass (1995, in Britain Northern Lights)
The Subtle Knife (1997)
The Amber Spyglass (2000).

I'd hesitate to call this brilliant fantasy series children's literature, as it seems to be received (the library copies I've read have bright, fluorescent green stickers that read "Teen"). Early on, you get brilliant descriptions of cultures that practice trepanation, and the books never seem to condescend. Pulman assumes that the reader, of whatever age, is going to be able to learn about this world akin to ours but so radically different.

The first book starts with Lyra, in Oxford, and her world changing around her. Children are disappearing, and Lyra is taken away from the College in which she grew up by Mrs. Coulter. She runs away, and is swept up with gypsies, and the story swirls through the remainder of the book and throughout the next two. The fantasy world revolves around the idea of many worlds, separated only slightly, and transitions between the various worlds. The story swirls around Lord Asriel, seemingly Lyra's uncle, who makes war on the Authority who is running the world. Describing the story, I feel the urge not to give anything away, and so I can't speak in more than generalities.

It's an incredibly well-written series. The allusions to Paradise Lost seem endless, but the story is clever, well-structured, well-told. The idea that the story is anti-Christian is patently ludicrous. There's a brilliant moment that I'll share that I'm still thinking about, about the nature of faith:

He closed the book.
"And that was how sin came into the world," he said, "sin and shame and death. It came the moment their daemons became fixed."
"But..." Lyra stuggled to find the words she wanted: "but it en't true, is it? Not like chemistry or engineering, not that kind of true? There wasn't really an Adam and Eve? The Cassington Scholar told me it was just a kind of fairy tale."
"The Cassington Scholarship is traditionally give to a free-thinker; it's his function to challenge the faith of the Scholars. Naturally he'd say that. But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it."
(The Golden Compass 327)

Read these three books. They're well worth the time.

2006-09-02T16:50:00.000-04:00

Harrison Owen, Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide, 1997.

I’ve been meaning to blog about this book since I read it back in May. It sat at my desk at work all summer, waiting for me to write about it. Of course, I’d been meaning to read the book for two years before I got around to it—ever since I heard the idea of Open Space mentioned by my friend Stephen, quite a space back now.

Put simply, open space technology is designed to get the people who care about particular ideas talking to one another with the goal of action. It’s quite a simple idea, really, and is quite profound as many simple ideas really are.

Basically, one has a theme. The theme is shared in a large open space, and people create sessions, and move between the sessions as they feel called. The organizing principle is that the right people show up to the right sessions at the right times. It's called the Law of Two Feet: if you're not contributing to a discussion, or getting something out of it, you're in the wrong discussion, and should move to another. Four ideas come from that:

Each person who comes to a discussion is one of the right people to be there

Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened

Whenever it starts, it starts at the right time

When it's over, it's over

If people thought like that more of the time, I'd have fewer painful meetings to sit through! Owen goes into detail about how to run such a conference, and offers some intriguing guidance, mostly in the form of stories about a variety of experiences in such a setting.

The idea of open space is fascinating, and I very much want to see it in an effective setting. The book impressed me enough that I mentioned it to my boss’s boss in my exit interview, as we were talking about how to get a group of people to move forward with ideas. Open space is really about taking responsibility to articulate ideas, and then to implement them: Owen’s book is well worth a read. I’m glad I bought it.

2006-08-24T11:44:00.000-04:00

Leonard Mlodinow, Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life, 2003.

My father loaned me this series of reflections by a postdoc student at Caltech about his time there, and in particular, his interactions with Richard Feynman. It was a decent read: Mlodinow writes about feeling inadequate and unworthy of the fellowship he held, and of his desperate search for a research topic that would interest him and let him play the academic game.

He describes the culture of the Caltech physics department, and the Gell-Mann and Feynman camps: the fiercely protective secretary, the other postdocs, the difference in habits of dress and of dining. It's more of a mise en scène piece than a story or a memoir.

I found the transcripts of conversations with Feynman interesting but unexciting. There's nothing startlingly new, and nothing I'd feel sorry had I not read. What the conversations reveal about Feynman is much of what the cult that thinks so highly of him (of which cult I am a member): a deep and grounded wisdom, a narrow focus on problems that excite him, and a desire to be challenged. The book does to a better job of not being hagiographical than do things like Gleick's biography and much of the other writing; the irascible side of Feynman feels integral, and not highlighted nor diminished.

I enjoyed reading the book, but I'm glad it was loaned to me rather than me having purchased it. I really would like to get better at this frugal reading thing.

2006-08-21T16:04:00.000-04:00

David Schickler, Kissing in Manhattan, 2001.

M.K. recommended this odd collection of not-quite-linked short stories to me. Schickler varies between a writing style of almost-realism to a style of outright magic-realism; I'm not sure which I preferred. The characters are an odd bunch; the satire is peculiar, and often biting. It was an enjoyable read, and the building that is at least peripherally important to most of the stories would be an interesting one in which to live. I think I may need to re-read some of the stories before I return this book to the library. The one firm thought I have is that Schickler seems to have first come to attention in The New Yorker, and that his stories seem to me to fit perfectly into that slightly off-kilter ilk.